“Inhale inspiration/exhale wonder/remember Right Now is all you have/constantly ask yourself/How can I make this now/The best now it could possibly be.”

-Christopher Johnson, “All I have in life is right now”

On an overcast and drizzly morning in late March, I found myself back at my alma mater, sitting through a five-hour conference with a roomful of people I didn’t even know. Still, we ended up having much more in common than I could have ever imagined. Plus, it was our chance to motivate one another to keep fighting against the never-ending pestilence called discrimination.

At that point in time, all I wanted was answers. I wanted to know what was being done about one of the most common, overlooked, and worst forms of discrimination that could ever exist.

Like all good journeys, it was going to take some serious probing out there in the world, and inside of me, to get anywhere with this, as I would soon find out.

Making some noise

At first, I was looking for a large movement or an ongoing demonstration with the whole nine yards: megaphones and marches to rattle everyone awake in the neighborhoods, and large poster boards screaming, “Let’s end the war among brothers” or “It’s time to love the diversity in diversity.”

That fantasy was crushed once my disappointing two-hour Google search ended. Even though I did come across several blog entries and essays from other people who had gone through the same thing as I did or even worse, there was still nothing MAJOR being done about it.

So I set my sights on the next best thing: on-campus advocacy groups. I’ve always heard they were a good resource for students that want to get involved and be informed on social issues, and I knew just where to go.

It felt strange calling up the Unity Center at Rhode Island College since I never did when I was there as a student. Ironically enough, it was the first place that came to mind, and I figured it wouldn’t hurt to try.

As I dialed the number to speak with Director Antoinette Gomes, I wondered what I was getting myself into. But it was too late to back out once she answered the call.

I was nervous, but got to the point. “Good afternoon, my name is LuzJennifer Martinez. I’m a freelance writer and alumni of Rhode Island College. I was looking to see if there is a group, event, or movement that the Unity Center knows of that addresses the issue of intra-racism.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

My heart sank. Was she offended already? Who did I think I was, mentioning something so negative to the director of the Unity Center, a group which focuses on bringing people together, not on what keeps them apart?

I didn’t think the term would be so loud and full of such weight when I said it, but it was like a crack of thunder just outside the window.

“Intra-racism. When people within an ethnic group or race discriminate against each other.”

“Yes, we come across that issue a lot and although there aren’t any specific events or groups to address it, there are some things going on,” she said.

Oh! Her response wasn’t incredulous; she just hadn’t heard what I had said. As a matter of fact, she didn’t even sound angry; she seemed to be thinking about what I was telling her.

The following night, Gomes said they were going to be showing a Neo-African film about the new narrative of being African American.

She also told me the Unity Center holds a diversity week on-campus every October, which I remembered from when I was an undergrad. “There’s a student organization on campus called L.I.F.E., which stands for Live, Inspire, Fight, Educate. I can give you their contact information if you’d like,” she added.

A week later I dialed the number L.I.F.E President Mariama Kurbally had forwarded to me through email, feeling much more confident than before. She explained that while the organization focuses on diversity as a whole, it does consider “the different parts to it.”

There are aspects like race relations (or “brown” and “black” relationships), that make diversity far more than just a “black” or “white” issue. She agreed with Gomes by saying that in many of the discussions and events hosted by L.I.F.E., intra-racism is always mentioned.

“Next month, we’re having our Diversity is a way of L.I.F.E conference, where we host sessions rather than one big convention. We usually talk about gender oppression, defining racism and intra-racism, to give people the tools to deal with it,” she continued.

Kurbally said she would get in touch as soon as everything was worked out, and I couldn’t wait to find out more about it.

From writer to attendee

The next thing I knew, I was sitting at the first focus group planning meeting of the conference at the Rhode Island College Student Union with a pen and notepad handy. Aside from meeting both Kurbally and Gomes in person, I got a better sense of what L.I.F.E was all about.

The organization was founded by Kurbally in 2008 with the mission to “promote individual development and improve the overall quality of life in a multicultural community,” by “giving its members a holistic understanding of pertinent social issues, empowering individuals through education, increasing awareness, and striving to create strong leaders within our communities from various backgrounds.”

I also met some of L.I.F.E.’s other officers and supporters. There was Vice President Malinda Bridges, Secretary Sandra Chevalier, Anthony Bailey, one of the conference presenters, and lastly, an L.I.F.E. member and R.I.C. undergraduate student whom, if I’m not mistaken, I remember being called “Tunde.”

Everyone sat at a square table, discussing details of the event like what time one information session would be held over the other and which activities to include throughout the conference. Kurbally filled in a tentative schedule on the dry erase board in the room, while I scribbled away on my yellow notepad.

I also found out that there would be a full one- hour session exclusively about intra-racism and it was all I could do to stop myself from grinning pathetically at the paper in front of me. About 10 minutes later, Hannah Resseger, a local spoken word poet and Rhode Island College graduate, walked in with Christopher Johnson and his daughter.

Johnson, another spoken word artist, was scheduled to perform his poetry during the conference and the conversation shifted into how he would go about it within the available time frame. In the end, some of the details were still not finalized, and the discussion shifted on to how the conference would be announced to the public. But before that, Kurbally asked us for some feedback.

“Does anyone else have any input? How about you guys, did you have any questions?”

She was talking to those of us who hadn’t said a word up until that point, but the comment still caught me by surprise. When she looked at me, I shook my head and looked down at my yellow pad. I felt bad for seeming indifferent, but I didn’t want to interfere since this was their conference.

I thought my job was to reflect back on how the event would address an issue of diversity like intra-racism. Yet, seeing the interest in what I had to say made me realize this was going to be different.

It was going to take more than just note-taking and listening; I was going to have to put down my pen and paper and get involved.

Finding common ground in diversity

The conference was scheduled to begin at nine a.m. in the Alger Hall building on the Rhode Island College campus with a breakfast and check-in. I arrived at 10:30 a.m., promising myself not to write a single word down until after the event. Thinking I would be able to quietly slip in without being noticed, I found myself waiting outside the electronically locked door of the high-tech classroom everyone was gathered in.

While I stood there hoping for someone to notice me, I felt like a student who was late for class and had missed the most important part of the lecture. The feeling intensified when I plopped down into a blue chair to join the circle of about 35 people with name tags stuck to their shirts.

They weren’t all college students either. There was a mix of parents, working adult professionals, high school students, and even a couple of professors I recognized from around campus not too long ago.

Everyone was sharing their impressions about some images they had just seen on a large screen depicting acts of hate throughout history. It was part of the first presentation of the day, from Rhode Island College alum Anthony Bailey, called “Connecting to Difference.”

I had arrived just in time for the final interactive activity, which brought us all to our hands and knees. We had 10 minutes to write out our answers to 15 personal assessment questions on large poster size sheets in black marker.

After that, we were told to hang them up along the walls and boards of the spacious room. Once I got the separate ditto with the questions, I huddled down over the large paper on the floor.

By the time I looked up from my answers, most of the walls were already covered so I settled for one of the easels lined up on one side of the room.

Bailey surveyed the rows of papers with different handwriting taped to the wall.

When we finished, he said, “Now I want you all to go around and silently read the answers from as many other people as you can, except your own. When you read a statement or answer that you agree with, put a check mark and your initials next to it.”

We made our rounds, with everyone’s shoes shuffling slightly as we moved from paper to paper. You could hear muffled whispers buzzing in the air.

“Oops, sorry!”

“Here, you can read it now, I’m done.”

All along, I was preparing myself for the sight of my paper with nothing but the answers I had written. I eventually started focusing on the responses from the other posters and found some statements I related to.

I love GOD and my family, check, JM.

I like learning from other people, check, JM.

I want to make a difference in the world, check, JM.

Soon it was time to read our own papers again, and I was shocked to find a modest sprinkle of checks, initials, and even smiley faces on mine.

We all returned to our seats in the circle so Bailey could conclude his presentation.

“Even though we are all different, we harbor similarities, and that’s how we can connect to one another,” he said.

Memories, rhymes, and tears

James Montford, Director of the Bannister Art Gallery at Rhode Island College, was next in line to present a session. But before that, Hannah Resseger popped up out of her seat and made her way to the center of the circle to recite a poem.

She stood quiet for a second before hurling into an emotionally charged performance that answered the timeless question, “Who am I?” Throughout the introspective narrative, you could feel Resseger fighting as a performer and protagonist against the preconceived labels inflicted on her by others.

It perfectly depicted the inner turmoil of when you are told who you are as a person of a particular group or culture, even if you don’t relate to it. I sat enthralled, watching Resseger’s afflicted enunciations and animated expressions as she jumped from identity to identity in despair, anger, and resignation.

All the while, I re-lived the indirect accusations of how I was neither American enough to pursue my independent ventures nor Puerto Rican enough to be passionate about what was rightfully mine.

I bit my lip but couldn’t stop my eyes from welling over. Montford sat almost directly across from me on the other side of the circle and his face blurred for several seconds.

I looked away in embarrassment, feeling surprised and frustrated I had reacted that way. But I wasn’t the only one who would be emotionally moved at the conference.

Montford’s “When You Feel Difference” session began with some group sharing. To the people who were sitting to his right, he said, “I want you to tell us your earliest memory of when you first felt different.”

A Hispanic teen described how when he was little and newly arrived from his country of origin, he sat in class one day feeling very sick and was unable to tell the teacher in time because of the language barrier.

When it was her turn to speak, a young Latina woman started describing something about her childhood but was so soft-spoken I couldn’t hear her.

As soon as she shared her memory, she burst into tears and remained visibly upset for about five minutes. I couldn’t stop looking at her, and wondered what it was that had affected her so much throughout her life.

When there were about 4 people ahead of me to speak, Montford reversed the directions of the activity. He asked the people sitting to his left and on to describe their most recent memory of when they felt different.

A young couple next to me said they felt different being the only ones married among their peers. Just a couple of chairs to my left, Christopher Johnson replied that he didn’t really have an example of recently feeling different because he has always considered himself to be so.

“I think that if I didn’t feel different, I wouldn’t feel right. Who wants to be all the same? I like being unique and being me,” he said.

Jay Chattelle, another spoken word artist who runs the Rhode Island Poets (RIP) venue with Johnson shared another perspective with the group. He said being at the conference was his most recent experience of feeling different because he couldn’t relate to everyone else’s perceptions on what difference was all about.

In a response to an email that I sent him after the conference, Chattelle gave some more insight as to what he meant by his comments that day.

“Being different to me is recognizing we are all the same. With everyone’s erg (sic) to be different and stand out, it’s a shame when we are the ones not taking responsibility for our actions. We are the ones that have to make change and we should start with ourselves,” he said.

At the conference, Rhode Island College Professor of Anthropology Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban also made a good point. She said we were taking action by simply being there to educate ourselves to be aware of diversity in our lives, as well as by learning from others and sharing our experiences.

“We are taking the time to be here and address it,” she said.

The power of words

After lunch, everyone settled in for some more poetry, this time from Christopher Johnson. As soon as he started, I couldn’t believe how fast he recited the intricate lines and wondered if he was free styling or had written it all down before hand.

He performed about 5 poems that all flowed beautifully to create different sentiments and tones. One of them called “Two angels” had a strong walk-a-mile-in-their-shoes effect and another one called “All I have in life is right now” was full of some refreshing philosophical insight. Of all the poems, the second one spoke directly to me the most, especially about discrimination and how to approach it:

“A friend of mine once told me/”there are a plethora of personality types in the world/One fact of life/meeting assholes is unavoidable”/Assholes have one purpose, to shit/they will shit on you with no regard simply because that’s who they are/But an asshole is positioned low on the body/meaning you have to be lower than an asshole to be shit on by one/so the trick to avoid being shit on/ is to never allow yourself to be lower than the asshole…”

As the words flung out of Johnson toward the audience, the message hit me in the face like a cup of cold water. Of course! The key to attacking discrimination is to remain above it so it can never attack you. What the poem said to me was that nothing would ever be solved if you allow yourself to be “lower than the asshole” by either discriminating back or being submissive to it.

And sadly, the problem will always be around since we are bound to encounter assholes, as Johnson said. But we can make the most of now by deciding to stand up and fight against it through awareness and empowerment. The poetic explosion continued with Resseger, who recited another poem called “Matriarch.”

Again, her interpretation had a theatrical element to it, where Resseger took on the burden and pain of the protagonist and channeled it through every word and line. It was the perfect segue into the next presentation from Rhode Island College Psychologist Dr. Saeromi Kim, where we got to tap into the root of our feelings about bias and discrimination and how we react to it.

The majority of Dr. Kim’s “Emotions” session not only made us aware of the different feelings we encounter during moments of conflict or prejudice, it gave us an idea of the triggers which can bring them to life.

Kim even took it a step further by making us aware of the internal biases we harbor within ourselves and how they develop. We participated in an exercise called “both/and,” where we referred to one personal characteristic and then acknowledged its opposite or conflicting pair through a sentence.

Kim explained how that can keep you from focusing solely on one aspect of yourself, which eventually causes you to discriminate against the other. She wrote out an example in dark red ink on an easel.

“I am both ashamed of the privilege I’ve had when I was growing up and proud of what I accomplished on my own,” she said.

Soon after Kim insightful presentation, we all got into an interesting discussion lead by Anthony Bailey about “understanding privilege.” By then, the group had shrunk considerably, which only made the conversation more intimate and candid. We discussed what the term ‘privilege’ means and eventually concluded it all depends on how you look at it.

The concept can either have a positive or negative connotation to it, which, therefore, makes it a diverse and complex issue in itself.

Speaking out

It was just after two p.m. when it finally sunk in just how long we had been there. My eyes were getting pierced by the artificial brightness in the room and my legs hurt from crossing them so much.

And when would the intra-racism session start? While we were waiting for the next presentation, I tapped Bailey on the shoulder and asked him.

“We may not get to it since the speaker had a timing conflict and couldn’t make it,” he said.

I felt deflated but somehow didn’t lose hope that at any moment, the presenter would get there. I stayed hopeful during Dr. Maria Lawrence’s beautiful Native American style prayer, which celebrated diversity and asked for it to thrive and prosper.

The reality finally set in that the intra-racism session was a no-go when Dr. Lesley Bogad arrived in time to give the last presentation of the day about “Identities across differences.”

She was joined by two student representatives from the Advanced Learning and Leadership Initiative for Educational Diversity (A.L.L.I.E.D), a one credit class at R.I.C. dedicated to motivating students from underrepresented groups to pursue educational careers.

During the presentation, they talked about how A.L.L.I.E.D. also provides academic and cultural support to students so they can become teachers. As much as I didn’t want to, I had to go home in the middle of the session to prepare for an out of state trip I had the next day.

I shut the door behind me, leaving the small group clustered in front of a large screen with terms and phrases. That day, they taught me it doesn’t take a multitude of people causing a commotion through big demonstrations to make change; change can happen when we decide to expand our own knowledge on a cause and pass it on to the next person.

The conference also showcased the power and validity of on-campus groups like L.I.F.E., which are committed to heightening people’s awareness of diversity while encouraging them to celebrate it. Most of all, attending the conference really put into perspective for me my experience as an ethnic American who has dealt with intra-racism.

One time I was called the "quiet Puerto Rican," a seemingly innocent label that can be a precursor to a million other silent accusations. I’m the snobby one who would rather listen to alternative rock instead of Reggaeton, read a book than cook a meal, and speak English instead of Spanish.

The truth is I grew up listening to salsa, speaking Spanglish (a mixture of English and Spanish), and living off of my mother’s delicious ethnic cooking. So what exactly made me less Puerto Rican than the rest? Is it because I don’t live up to every expectation of what being a Puerto Rican woman is?

On the other hand, not everyone is like this. I’ve recently met people of my race while working for the Spanish press who are not so critical. They notice my accented Spanish but appreciate the fact that I’m trying. They understand the language barrier, reassuring me that I speak Spanish much better than they speak English.

Most importantly, they accept me as one of their own and encourage me to always embrace my Hispanic identity. And I have been doing that, just in my own way. If there was anything the conference also taught me, it was to never allow the indirect criticism from others to make me question my identity as an ethnic American.

No matter what, I am Latina and always will be Latina, and as long as I know that, it doesn’t matter what others think. As an advocate for diversity, I shouldn’t perpetuate the cycle of discrimination by being hateful toward people of my race. I love my culture and there’s no reason for me to be hostile to anyone regardless of what some people have done to me.

Just like everything in life, there are always going to be critics who question who you are; it’s just a matter of turning negative energy into positive motivation to make the world better with the little bit of knowledge that you have.

It won’t happen overnight and it won’t be easy, but I am committed to taking action. And thanks to the L.I.F.E. organization and those who attended the conference, I now know I am definitely not alone.

LuzJennifer Martinez

"Ladies, ladies!" A tall black man calls out to the two girls swishing down the sidewalk in short skirts. "Reggae bar, right here, come with me!"

The girls stop and turn toward the man. Behind them, the neon signs of nightclubs buzz. People of all accents and colors stream past, laughing and joking. "You got free drinks?" asks the brunette. Her face is round, her accent American. In her heels, she’s almost as tall as the man.

"Free entry all night!" says the man, throwing an arm around the girls’ shoulders and tugging them toward the bar.

The two young women don’t budge. "You got free drinks? For girls?" the brunette asks again. "We only wanna go if you got free drinks."

"Don’t worry, baby," the man says. His voice is deep and rich, the vowels rounded by a faint accent. "For you, it’s the first drink free. For a beautiful woman like you."

She remains skeptical. Her friend, a thin girl with wild, curly hair, takes one of the bar’s advertising fliers from the man. "Yeah, it says that here," she points. "It says, ‘First drink free,’ see?"

The brunette relaxes. The man, Danny Lekson, grins. The girls allow themselves to be led toward the bar, located on the fourth floor of a Tokyo highrise. The elevator doors close with Danny crowded between the two girls, his smile visible a second longer than theirs.

Nearly 40 years old, Danny Lekson works as a street caller – a man who pulls customers into bars – in an area of Tokyo called Roppongi. By day, Roppongi is a testament to Tokyo’s cosmopolitanism. Art museums, business offices, and luxury shopping plazas sparkle like jewels in the city’s international crown. But as dusk descends, the district transforms into a notoriously seedy meat market, where American military men prowl for willing women and international businessmen blow off steam at all-you-can-drink strip clubs. Danny works as one of the dozens of Nigerians who line the streets at night, shucking fliers and tugging the sleeves of passersby, pushing bars with cheap drinks and easy women. To the ex-pats who frequent the area, the group of tenacious Africans is "the gauntlet," a column of men whose solicitation, some say, borders on harassment.

Roppongi, with all its foreign faces, is an anomaly in a country that has traditionally prided itself on its unique, homogenous culture. For decades, Japan refused to open its borders to foreign influence until the American navy wrenched them apart in 1854. Today, at roughly 1.7% of the the population, immigrants are a tiny minority in the country. But as birth rates drop and the work force grays, many Japanese are calling for efforts to increase immigration. New people with new skills, the thinking goes, are needed to sustain the competitiveness of the world’s second largest economy. But the government has made it clear that Japan is not throwing open its gates to the huddled masses just yet. In the wake of Japan’s soaring unemployment rates during the recession, the country is seeking skilled, specialized immigrants.

The men who work as street callers, most of whom are Nigerian, are seen by some to be the exact opposite of the kind of immigrants Japan desires. Nigerians have always represented the largest African population in Japan, and their numbers have been steadily increasing every year. In 2007, the population consisted of 2,523 legal residents. "Roppongi is now virtually a foreign neighborhood," the governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, complained in 2006. "Africans – I don’t mean African-Americans – who don’t speak English are there doing who knows what."

Often, other foreigners are no more sympathetic. One American, a ten-year resident of Japan, sees the street callers as banished criminals of shadowy provenance. "Those guys in Roppongi, they’ll cut your throat for a dollar," he said. "They all used to be in Nigeria carrying machetes on the street. And most of them can’t go back. That’s like being the worst guy in prison, getting kicked out of Nigeria."

Simon Ewuare, a 29-year-old Nigerian who came to Tokyo seven years ago, doesn’t dwell on such comments. To be successful in Japan, he tells newcomers, you can’t "think about if they hate you or not. Put it out of your mind."

A soft-spoken man with small town manners, Simon covers his solid frame with brand new Rocawear jerseys and bleach-white Nikes. But he wasn’t always so stylish. As a young man, he did, in fact, carry a machete back in Nigeria – but it wasn’t on the street, and it wasn’t for long. As the eldest son of a well-off cocoa farmer, Simon was expected to apprentice under his father and eventually take over the business. But the thought of spending the rest of his life cooped up in his family’s little village made him want to run far away. So he did. In his late teens, he ended up in Benin City, a coastal capital known as the home of some of Nigeria’s most esteemed universities. With a cousin, he started a transport business. Soon, one semi-truck multiplied into five, all busy hauling goods across the hills of Nigeria.

By the age of 22, Simon had become a self-made businessman. He began wondering what he could do abroad. "I actually got a visa to America," he says, with a trace of pride. "But I talked to some friends there and they said, ‘It’s so hard here, the money’s not good here.’ So I talked to friends in Japan. They said, ‘Come here, it’s good here.’"

When Simon first arrived on a three-month sightseeing visa, he was taken care of by relatives and friends who had come before him. The African community in Tokyo is tightly knit. In some cases, it’s as if entire swaths of villages have been uprooted and transplanted: brothers live together; cousins work together; and friends who used to attend the same primary school back in Nigeria go out drinking together. In an exceptionally lucky break, Simon knew a Japanese man who had worked with his father in Africa and who agreed to be his guarantor, a person or company required by Japanese law to be responsible for an immigrant who desires certain kinds of residency or work permits.

Danny Lekson, the bar caller in Roppongi, was not so lucky. After his three-month sightseeing visa expired, he stayed. Despite the risk of detainment and deportation, he’s not the only one who has made such a decision. At any given time, there are estimated to be more than 91,000 immigrants living in Japan on overstayed visas. Visa-related arrests make up a significant percentage of the crime that foreigners commit in Japan, and contribute to statistics that, compared side-by-side with the crime rates of citizens, make it look as if foreigners are much more dangerous than Japanese natives. Though the numbers are endlessly contested and re-interpreted, many people agree that excepting visa-related offenses, the crime rates of foreigners and natives are nearly equal. For five years, Danny lived in Japan without a visa, hopping from factory to factory. Before emigrating to Japan when he was 28, he had studied international relations and had worked as a journalist. Spending hours stamping sheet metal and walking on eggshells around bosses who could deport him at his first mistake was not the life abroad he had envisioned.

His salvation came at a Shinjuku club, in the form of an attractive Japanese woman named Yayoi. The two hit it off, and eventually, she agreed to marry him, despite his illegal status. The couple walked down to the local municipal office and announced their intentions. "How it works is, they take you to one room, and make you sign a paper about getting deported," says Danny, wearily rubbing his eyes. "And then you go into another room, and you sign a paper that says you are on probation."

The marriage loophole is a route to legality that many overstayers have taken. "They want to marry us," Danny says about the dozens of Japanese women who have African husbands. "I don’t know why." He pauses. "If you want to stay, there is almost no other way."

For Danny, marriage did not work out so well. After a few years together, his wife petitioned for divorce while he was visiting family in Nigeria. They no longer speak, but their seven-year-old daughter, Olucha, is a reminder of their time together. According to Danny, Yayoi refuses to let him see Olucha. In another long-standing point of contention between Japanese and foreigners, Japan affords foreign parents almost no custodial rights in the case of mixed children. Although Olucha lives just a few train stops away from Danny, he can’t remember when the last time he saw her was. Every time they talk on the phone, her English ability has faded a bit more. "They paint her with their native food and language, you know," he says. "I speak to her in English. She understands. But sometimes I call, and she doesn’t understand."

In a bar owned by his younger brother in Roppongi, Danny introduces me to his friend Michael, a 32-year-old dressed like a member of the ’80s hip hop group Run-DMC, in a black fedora and a snug leather jacket. Michael also works in Roppongi, where he says he makes about $45,500 a year as the manager of a strip club. He’s reserved but polite, and sits at the bar chain smoking. When I ask what town he’s from, he says, "Igbo," naming the second largest tribe in Nigeria.

Michael, who came to Japan three years ago, is married to a Japanese woman and has a two-year-old daughter. He shows me a picture of her on his cell phone: a delicately featured girl with skin the color of rain-soaked suede, staring up from the screen with eyes as bright as her smile. Michael’s interest is piqued when he learns I work as a kindergarten teacher at a Tokyo international school (where, for the sake of comparison, the average teacher earns about $9,000 less than Michael). "It’s all in English? They learn English?" he asks. "How much does it cost?" I tell him it’s $7,500 a year (later, I realize it’s more like $14,000 a year). He nods slowly, considering the price. "That’s ok, I can do that," he says. "If it’s in English." While Michael works, his daughter stays home all day with her mother, who speaks Japanese. Michael speaks English. He and his wife get by with the few words they can speak of each other’s language. But when Michael talks to his daughter, she can’t understand a word he says.

Simon, the well-dressed cocoa farmer’s son, was also married to a Japanese woman. Though they didn’t have any children, their relationship also ended in divorce. From the beginning, he says, her family did not accept him. "Her father took me [aside] and told me that it would not last," he says. But he wasn’t concerned; that’s how fathers are. "Even my own sister, she married a Nigerian man, but our father didn’t like him. But then later it’s ok, he’s accepted." His wife’s father didn’t end their marriage, but the couple’s differing goals did. She wanted to move to Norway, an idea that puzzled Simon. "Why do I want to go to Norway?" he asked her. "I am already a foreigner here, why do I want to go be a foreigner in Norway?"

Simon had a reason for wanting to stay in Japan. With the freedom of a sponsored visa even before he met his wife, Simon had been able to attend a Japanese-language school for two years while working nights at a restaurant. He had become confident enough in Japanese to begin thinking about doing what he did best: starting his own business. Just as he had turned to a cousin in Benin City to learn the transportation trade, he turned to a cousin in Tokyo to learn the clothing trade.

If Roppongi is where clothes come off, then Harajuku is where clothes are bought. The area, made famous overseas by Gwen Stefani and her Harajuku Lovers clothing line, is the heart of Tokyo’s reputation as a fashion free-for-all. Its main artery is Takeshita Street. On any given day, Takeshita Street is crammed with Japanese school girls and foreign tourists gawking at stores selling gothic Little Bo Peep costumes and vinyl sexy nurse outfits. To Simon, it was the perfect place for his shop: It was where people went to spend money.

Simon set his sights on the hip hop clothing business. The baggy style of urban America found a following among Japanese youth in the late 1990s. As fashion and rap music became increasingly intertwined, "hip hop shops" began sprouting up all over the city. For the Japanese trendsetters who could afford to pay $300 for a pair of sagging shorts, the presence of black employees made the shops’ image all the more authentic.

But Simon did not want to be a mere employee. He wanted to be the owner.

He had had only brief exposure to the intricate business customs of Japan, observing what he could while busing tables and chopping vegetables at the restaurant where he worked. His Japanese ability was far from fluent. And he was a foreigner. But he held tight to something he had learned when he arrived as a teenager in Benin City, as an immigrant on a ticking tourist visa in Tokyo, and as the unwanted son-in-law of a Japanese bride: "In the beginning, everything is difficult."

The first obstacle was securing a location on Takeshita Street. As one of the most heavily trafficked areas in the city, it was prime real estate. With the "gift money," security deposits, and advance rent that Japanese realtors demand upon signing a lease, the shoebox-sized space he had his eye on would cost nearly $60,000 upfront. But money wasn’t the problem. Simon paid in cash, wiring the money from an account in Nigeria where he had saved his profits from the semi-truck business. The problem was getting the realtor to take him seriously as a client. "They see you’re a foreigner, and they say no, they want to skip you," he says. He went about finding Japanese people who were willing to be paid to act as the face of his business. "You get some of their own people and push them forward, and then it is ok."

To Simon, this kind of adaptation is not a big deal. "A lot of foreigners complain," he says. "But Japanese are good people. In Nigeria, too, there are different groups of people. Everyone is different." In Simon’ home country, conflicts between the northern Muslims and the southern Christians have persisted for years, sparking riots every few months that kill hundreds at a time and displace thousands. If all he has to do to reach his goals is let the Japanese find comfort by dealing with other Japanese faces, then he is more than willing.

After only a couple of years in the clothing business, Simon was successful enough to open a second store in Tokyo and bring his brother over from Nigeria to staff it. Though he ducks his head bashfully when asked how much his business makes – "We only just met!" he says, practically blushing – he can afford to pay the $2,700 monthly rent on his Harajuku location, the $28,500 he says he pays each of his three street callers, the $45,500 salary his brother earns as a store manager, along with dozens of other expenses, and still have enough money left over to save for his next venture: a filling station in Nigeria.

The money that can be made by young, ambitious immigrants in Japan is seemingly endless. In some cases, it’s enough to lure them from other foreign countries. Michael, the father of the two-year-old who can’t understand him, previously tried his luck during a four-year spell in Switzerland. But conditions in Japan are better, he says. The most he could ever hope to make in Geneva was only $26,000 a year, almost half of what he makes now in Tokyo.

To some foreigners, especially those from developed countries, the entrepreneurial activities of the Nigerians indicate greed. "They don’t care about the culture of Japan," says one English teacher. "They’re only here to make money." But Danny Lekson says foreigners from rich countries don’t understand the circumstances behind his financial ambitions. When "an African makes money," he says, "it’s not for me alone. There are so many people looking up to me. So [$2,700 a month as a factory worker] is enough for me, but there are still problems back home. My nieces and nephews need pocket money in school. I have to pay for so many people back home." In Nigeria, Danny owns three homes. All of them house his extended family members.

Traveling across the world to be the main breadwinner for a dozen or more family members takes more than courage and a sense of adventure. It takes money. The average price of a one-way ticket from Lagos to Tokyo is around $1,500, and in the world’s most expensive city, charges pop up like inflatable boxing toys. Danny Lekson and Simon Ewuare both come from relatively well-off families in Nigeria. In a country where only slightly more than half of the children attend even elementary school, both men attended high school. Danny even went on to earn a four-year university degree. Talking about people like Simon, who attended a language school while working part time for two years, one Senegalese man says, "Any time you see Africans studying in Japan, they come from rich families."

Despite Danny’s education and Simon’ ambition, both of them are just anonymous faces in the crowds of Nigerian street callers that some characterize as nothing more than brutal thugs. Last year, the American Embassy issued a warning about partying in Roppongi after a string of incidents involving tainted drinks and stolen credit card information. Foreign users of an online forum about Japan immediately fingered Nigerians as the culprits. In one of the tamer comments, a user advised, "Avoid all Nigerians in any way, shape or form." Another described a scenario in which "a mate" followed a Japanese man to a bar, only to be confronted by an empty room until "out of the darkness half a dozen huge Nigerian dudes appeared" and demanded money. He lamented the injustice of the situation, explaining his friend was "an affluent hard-working professional who had been in Japan for over 10 years" while the supposed aggressors were "filthy african [sic] illegal immigrant [expletives] who had probably arrived on a plane from that [expletive] continent that very morning." To explain the lack of evidence connecting Nigerians to the drink-spiking incidents, users accuse the Japanese police force of indifference to crimes targeting foreigners.

Of course, not all of the foreigners in Tokyo are as obviously prejudiced as users of that message board. Wikitravel, the travel guide offshoot of Wikipedia that is updated freely by site users, blames the drink scams on seductive foreign females hired by disreputable bars rather than Africans working in the area. But all of the sources are right about one thing: crime does exist in Roppongi and, like every group in the area, the Nigerians have perpetrators among them.

One evening, a couple hours into his bar-calling shift, Danny and I walk into Don Quijote, the foreign-import emporium near his post on Roppongi’s main street. It’s the middle of allergy season in Tokyo, and Danny has had a raspy cough and itchy eyes all day. If it keeps up, it’s going to be a long night. As we walk into the store, Danny heads straight to the back, toward the medicine supplies. I linger near the entrance, distracted by a large display of makeup imported from America. After a couple of minutes, I scan the aisles for Danny, but he’s nowhere in sight. I choose a tube of mascara and wait my turn in the checkout line. As I receive my change from the cashier, my cell phone rings.

"Where are you?" Danny asks. I tell him I’m at the checkout, and walk a ways toward the back of the store, where he is. He comes toward the front. We meet in the middle. "You want me to buy you something?" he asks. He scans the area and offers the nearest, cheapest item, Japanese sweet potatoes roasting inside a heated glass case that cost a dollar each. "Here, you want a potato?"

"No, I’m fine," I said. "I already bought something, that’s why I didn’t see you."

"Oh, you bought something?" he asks, still scanning the area around us. "Ok, so let’s go."

Once we’re out of the bright store and back on the dark sidewalk, Danny opens his hand to reveal a tube of allergy-combating nasal spray. Maybe he bought it while I was looking at the mascara, I think, but I doubt it. He pulls a crumpled Don Quijote shopping bag out of his pocket and puts the tube inside. I wonder if he carries the shopping bag with him all the time, or if it’s shared among his friends.

I am surprised he is so trusting of me; earlier that night, it wasn’t the case. While we sat drinking and talking in his brother’s bar, an older Nigerian man had flung the door open and scanned the dark room. The moment he spotted Danny, the older man strode up to him. He had the kind of crazed eyes and ecstatic grin usually only seen with people high on stimulants, even though drug use is very low in Japan. He held a yellow plastic bag containing something heavy. He gave it to Danny, who peeked inside and then handed it off to another man. The man looked down at the object, raised his eyebrows, then stashed it behind the bar.

"What was in that guy’s bag?" I asked.

Danny barely hesitated before he answered, "Ah, some special wine, I think, some secret expensive wine."

A couple of minutes later, I asked Michael, Danny’s friend who had been interested in sending his daughter to international school. "Personal electronics," he said from behind his cloud of cigarette smoke. "A car stereo, I think."

It became slightly easier to understand how the governor of Tokyo, during an interview with the foreign press, could assert so nonchalantly that the presence of Africans in Roppongi is "leading to new forms of crime, like car theft."

Over on the other side of Tokyo, in Harajuku, Simon finds out his story will be told in the same article as Danny’s story. He is furious. "We are not the same people, I am not a Roppongi person!" he roars. Besides his rueful ruminations on Nigerian politics, it’s the only time he’s been anything but politely accommodating. "You say we are all Nigeria, but we are not the same! Even I, when I come here, even I am surprised about Roppongi!" But his anger soon fades to weary appeals: "Please, please, tell them I am not in that business, of the credit cards and this, it’s not for me. For me, you like the clothes, you buy them, if you don’t, you don’t!" He is, understandably, desperate not to bring any disturbance to his business: it is his future. He sees his life in Japan as an arrow aimed toward a secure, relaxed retirement in Nigeria. His profits have been bruised by recession-tightened fists, and he looks forward to opening an economy-proof petrol station in Africa. "I don’t want any trouble, I just want to do my business here," he says to me, pleading, "and then go home."

In The Fray Contributor

Waiting customers, mostly westerners who come to sip coffee at his cafe a minute, walk from the Tsuglag Khang, the Dalai Lama’s main temple opposite the god-king’s exile residence in the Indian Himalayas. Jamphel Sichoe comes from an immigrant background and knows what it is like to grow up with multiple traditions, having “chinky” little eyes which most ethnic Indians consider being of Chinese origin. Sichoe, 24, born in exile, works each day from noon till night attending to customers at his café. He wears an Indian dress, but in his mind are thoughts of his unseen homeland, Tibet.

Like all Tibetan shops, his cafe has a Dalai Lama portrait hanging on the wall, featuring a khata, a traditional scarf, as a holy gesture. During his long shifts, he stands managing the café, at times on with social networking sites on his MacBook. Though with each day’s hard work he finds himself restless – helping his Dad with English translations every morning, participating in various non-governmental organizations and Tibet support groups, organizing various human rights protests.

As the sun sets his old friends – Tenzin Chemi, Dolkar and Kalsang – come to meet at the café to sit around talking about their daily activity. Chemi and Kalsang were born inside Tibet but fled into exile with their family when they were 10 years old, following massive unrest inside Tibet. Both come from areas far inside Tibet, where technology and modern living are just dreams. Chemi and Kalsang are from Amdo province inside Tibet, while Dolkar and Sichoe are from Shigaste and Lhasa, in Tibet’s mainland. They all come from far corners of the large autonomous region now under Chinese rule. Chemi and his family crossed the border with the help of a guide and trekked through the mountains for more than a month before reaching Nepal, where he was kept in a Tibetan refugee center before being sent to the one in Dharamsala, the de-facto capital of Tibetans in exile in India.

They are the young guns of the exiled Tibetan community, educated to understand world politics and keeping up traditions, customs and religion in the midst of modernity. They talk about ethnic conflicts within the society; about disputes between the People’s Republic of China and their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama; about the unrest they hear about inside Tibet and its outlying areas. About solutions to the political divide between generations in exile. About the Free Tibet movement. About lives and grass root problems they face each day, living in a land that is not their own with many complicated factors – poverty, racism, political or oppression. About the brutal suppression their countrymen have faced throughout their lives. Solutions to Tibet’s problems seem hard to come by, and hope is fast receding with the 74-year-old Dalai Lama aging; Tibet’s problems almost too numerous to count. They debate in Tibetan, Hindi and broken English, at times speaking typical local dialects, as if they were Indians making fun of each other.

As they finish meeting, Sichoe thinks of the day’s most important work he needs to perform – working with Tibet support groups until late in the night. He’ll be organizing tomorrow’s event, and a lot of effort has gone into this organization. The date is March 10, and this year it will be the 51st anniversary of the failed Tibetan Uprising against the Chinese rule, marking 51 years of the Dalai Lama’s flight into exile with thousands of his followers, who left their homeland in search of freedom and the desire to live their lives as they see fit. They say they did so to avoid political oppression and religious persecution.

Closing the café at 9, Sichoe walks back home down the steep road lined with deodar. The sky is dark over the Himalayas, and there is a shiver of cold despite the fact that spring is almost here. At home his eldest brother’s family waits for dinner. His father is a highly religious person and is early to bed after the evening prayers. Sichoe rests a few minutes before watching news on the TV, news of security beefed up in Tibet’s capital Lhasa ahead of tomorrow’s celebration of the 51st anniversary. Chinese police have cordoned off the entire city. His niece Choezom, who is half his age, listens carefully to the family’s conversation. She studies in a convent school where most of the students are local Indians.

Soon Sichoe finishes his dinner with his family members, and with many things to do for tomorrow, he meets his friends who await him down the street from his residence, and from there they all go straight to the community hall. There is a meeting with fellow refugees to discuss tomorrow’s event. Some of them prepare by writing anti-China, Free Tibet and human rights slogans on cardboard for display at the tomorrow’s ceremony and during protest marches on the streets. Sichoe helps other refugees, mostly newcomers, to get excited about tomorrow’s event. He stays up until midnight helping his friends, and then he goes back home, hoping for a successful event tomorrow.

**********

The light comes up above the animated settlement on its little ridge overlooking the Kangra Valley, and chants from the temple carry on the morning breeze. A gong sounds as the sun comes up above the snowcaps. The day has come that every Tibetan awaits: March 10. The morning before he goes out to attend the ceremony, Sichoe prays at his family’s prayer hall. Like many other Tibetans, he does the kora – the holy walk around the Dalai Lama’s residence and temple.

Thousands of Tibetan exiles and their supporters, most of them dressed in traditional silk and wool robes, gather in the compound of a Buddhist temple to hear the Dalai Lama and other senior leaders of the Tibetan government-in-exile on the eve of the day marking 51 years of exile. The crowds include hundreds of Tibetan children dressed in school uniforms, Tibetan nuns and monks in orange and maroon robes, and other young Tibetans with “Free Tibet” and Tibet’s national flag painted on their faces.

In the speech the Nobel Peace laureate blasted Chinese authorities, accusing them of trying to “annihilate Buddhism” in Tibet. His message has an impact in the refugee community that has made a visible effort to keep Tibetan culture alive – its language, crafts, and the practice of Tibetan Buddhism. Soon after the Dalai Lama’s speech thousands of Tibetan monks and youths march through the streets, shouting pro-Tibet slogans and praying for the Dalai Lama. The demonstrators, including those who followed the Dalai Lama when he fled Tibet and their children, all pledge support to their spiritual leader.

Indeed, new generations remain devoted to the cause. There have been no signs that Tibetans in exile here will give up their hope of returning to their homeland in freedom. And many are confident they will ultimately achieve their goal. An elderly Tibetan in the crowd says, “Don’t let anyone steal your dream. It’s our dream, not theirs. As long as there is no enemy within, enemies outside cannot hurt you.”

For the first generation immigrants, the image of the homeland remains quite vivid in the mind’s eye, despite planting firm roots in their new homes over successive generations. The images may gradually recede, but Tibetan people living in exile still hold firmly to the notion of freedom and rang btsan, or self-determination, hoping that their country will be given back to them some day. In fact, living in exile has only strengthened the resolve of Tibetans to regain their homeland.

Hundreds of Tibetans from different walks of life stage a massive protest rally, which starts from the main temple and culminates at a local bazaar. Huge presences of Tibetan protestors on the streets lead to traffic chaos. Since he has eagerly awaited this day, Sichoe joins the massive protest as well. Wearing the Tibetan flag over his back and marching down the steep roads from Mcleod Ganj down to the Indian bazaar in Dharamsala, he shouts slogans, appealing to world leaders to listen to their plight. The event climaxes in a candlelight vigil, with participants holding banners with slogans like “Stop torture in Tibet” and “China stole my land, my voice and my freedom.” Young radical groups shout anti-China slogans and call for rangzen, or full independence, for Tibet.

In the last 51 years, India has attracted many Tibetan refugees with its image of a slow pace of life and a peaceful lifestyle for refugees of all nationalities. This exiled community has created a new Tibet away from Tibet – a Tibet 2.0 — that aims to be more modern, more visible and more internationally connected than the real, existing Tibet over the border. There are over 12,000 exiles living in the valley; most reside in the suburb of Dharamsala known as Mcleod Ganj.

Sichoe’s father fled into exile in 1959 just after the Dalai Lama. Once in India, he lived with his family in Darjeeling and Mysore until 1981, and later in Madhya Pradesh in central India until 1990, quietly serving as a lama for the Tibetan community in exile throughout that time. Sichoe was born in Chattisgarh, an Indian state, but soon his family moved to Dharamsala to be closer to His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. He went to school at the Tibetan children’s village where all Tibetans get educated, mostly funded by support organizations. Sichoe believes he’s living in the world’s most successful refugee community, but this wasn’t his peoples’ aim. Many refugees feel they have no purpose and meaning in life. The pain of being an exile is that you do not belong where you stay, and you cannot return where you belong.

For Sichoe life in Dharamsala is a positive, multicultural, and diverse experience of everything from “shanty” to Bollywood, which he enjoys. Still, though, there is sadness. Sometimes he forgets he’s a refugee, but at the end of day he remembers. He believes that China thinks every Tibetan in exile is a criminal, and he wonders if he is.

The night after the candlelight vigil, Sichoe, drained of energy, returns home. The buzzing town is full of travelers and Tibetan shops remains closed all day to commemorate the event. At home his family prepares the special dinner when all members of the family will sit together, eating, before the short prayer. Tibetan dishes fill the evening after the day’s hard work, with soup bowls, mutton momos, tingmo, the Tibetan bread, rice noodles, chicken and thupka all served at the table in a small room and presented with Tibetan Thangkas.

After the special dinner, Sichoe helps his family clean the room while others collect the plates to wash. His niece Choezom enjoys time with Sichoe, sharing with him her day’s activities. Tired, Sichoe wishes all a good night and walks to the front of his room. As he enters his room he sees one of the cardboards he prepared the night before, on which he wrote “China: respect human rights in Tibet.”

*******

Sichoe wishes to return to his homeland as a Tibetan, not a Chinese. India is the best country for refugees, but it’s not the same as being a citizen of his homeland. Sichoe’s homeland Tibet is a plateau region in Asia. Often referred as “Roof of the World,” Tibet is the highest region on earth. During Tibet’s history, it has existed as a region of separate sovereign areas, a single independent entity that is now under Chinese sovereignty. Approximately 6 million people live across the Tibetan Plateau, and about 150,000 live in exile, who have fled from modern-day Tibet to India, Nepal, and other countries.

However, for Tibetan refugees, the picture is quite different. They left their homeland in search of freedom and escape from the Chinese dominance over the region. With 51 years in exile, most refugees and their children have been forced to resettle throughout the world. The Dalai Lama’s seeds of compassion are helping young refugees to settle and maintain their ethnic culture.

Tibet is extremely hard to reach, but China’s recent development has connected it to the world, despite it being hemmed in on the south by the Himalayas and on the north by the almost equally high Kunlun Mountains. The terrain is inhospitable, since the plateau itself is about 15,000 feet above sea level. The climate is harsh, with violent swings of temperature between night and day at all times of the year. It is well-known as the “Third Pole of the Globe.” The world’s highest summit-Himalayan, which strides across the boarder between China and Nepal, claims a height of 8,848 meters above sea level. Lhasa is the administrative capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region in the People’s Republic of China. It is located at the foot of Mount Gephel. The city is the seat of the Dalai Lama, the location of the Potala and Norbulingka palaces having names in World Heritage Sites, and the birthplace of Tibetan Buddhism. The Jokhang in Lhasa is regarded as the holiest center in Tibet.

All young Tibetan exiles are torn between these two views of Tibet – one magnificent, the other horrible. For Sichoe his homeland is far from sight. He was born in Chhattisgarh, a state in India. His father is the 9th Jestun Dhampa, the most religious figure in Mongolia after the Dalai Lama. Khalkha Jetsun Dampa is considered one of the most revered teachers of the Kalachakra Tantra, the Tara Tantra, and Maitreya, the future Buddha. His incarnation was recognized, at the age of four, by Reting Rinpoche, the Regent in Lhasa, as well as other high lamas and the state oracles. His identity was kept secret due to Stalin’s influence and oppression in Mongolia. At the age of 25, he gave back his monastic vows, and then went to stay at Ganden Phunstok Ling, established by his predecesor Taranatha, until the age of 29 when the Chinese invasion forced him into exile, along with hundreds of thousands of Tibetans.

Then, in 1991, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the newfound religious freedom in Mongolia, many Mongolian monasteries sent their abbots, lamas, and ministers to India to discuss with the Dalai Lama, in Dharamsala, the possible location of the Ninth Khalkha Jetsun Dampa. It was at that time, through the Religious Office of the Tibetan Government in Exile, that the Dalai Lama gave the official stamp of recognition and acknowledgement of the Ninth Khalkha Jetsun Dhampa, the spiritual head of Buddhism in Mongolia.

Sichoe is grateful for the teachings he’s gotten from his father. For him he feels 60 percent Tibetan, 20 percent Indian, and 20 percent American. His country will be wherever he’s make his living.

Thousands of mainly young Tibetans have escaped to the small hill town of Dharamsala, which has turned people from poor, rural Tibetan areas with little education, business and few career prospects in China into professionals whose horizons extend around the world.

As home to the Dalai Lama, the Karamapa Lama, Tibet’s third highest spiritual figure, and other high-ranking lamas and monks, Dharamsala is the heart of Tibetan exile life, and its hills are adorned with Tibetan prayer flags. The town, where monks and nuns outnumber tourists, is also thronged with small cafes, bustling with activity as monks perform their daily routines and teach courses in Buddhism, while locals engage in community activities such as volunteering as teachers. The Tibetan equanimity is striking. The town is smaller than an average county town in China and possesses modest economic resources, yet there is a notable calm. Some of this may derive from the regular stream of new arrivals from Tibet. They have not risked their lives on tough journeys across the Himalayas to begin the next phase of their lives as refugees. Some want a better education, some want to become monks in monasteries, some just want a better life.

Recent Tibetan refugees even speak Chinese. A favorite pastime of the younger ones is spending time in Internet cafés, watching Chinese video-clips and chatting online. Tibetans making international calls to their relatives and friends on the other side of Himalayas often talk in Chinese. The young refugees are growing up defying easy definitions; the children of exile are slowly coming of age.

Sichoe knows time is running out, and even if he doesn’t go back, he’s ready to work and help his exile community. “I will work in the Tibetan government, may it be in exile or back inside Tibet, bringing more and more reforms is the need of the people,” Sichoe says. With a Bachelor of Arts degree from Delhi University, he’s talented, modern and has a Tibetan blood for struggle. He shares his thoughts about the life after the Dalai Lama, when Tibetans will have to struggle even more than they do today, but he’s ready as life moves on.

“Here, it’s like a confused cocktail of my citizenship – half Tibetan, half Indian and now with western culture rooting in us, it’s a blend,” he says. To go back to his homeland is his dream, like it is for many refugees. As each day dawns, Sichoe will walk the kora, and later he’ll help his father with English translations, then go back to the café at noon. For now, he sits on a stone overlooking the high mountains, dreaming of Lhasa.

Saransh Sehgal

Every day on my way to work I passed by them. They were sleepingon the cold floor in a corner of the train station: a mother; a father; and twoyoung children in between them. They were still there when I finished work.While I was on my way to a warm apartment, a hot meal and a nice hot shower,these parents would spend another night with their children on a freezingfloor. There had been quite some solidarity lately with asylum-seekers who wereforced to sleep on the streets. Most of them had found a roof above their headsfor the harsh winter nights. But not this family; they could not ask for asylumand a bed to sleep in because they already are European citizens. They areRoma, often called Gypsies or nomads, and are associated with negativestereotypes such as theft, domestic violence, and being slum-dwellers.

My first experience with the Roma was about five years ago when Iwas living in Valencia, Spain. To go to the beach from my place, I had to walkthrough a dodgy-looking neighborhood that seemed rather to be located in a poorEastern European country than in a developed country such as Spain. There weremany dogs and half-naked children on the streets. The women were often yellingand the men looked at me in a threatening way. I wanted to get out of there asfast as possible. During my time in Spain, many people warned me of the gitanos, who werepickpockets and would threaten me with knives. They never did, however, and Ibecame intrigued by this European minority that seems to be excluded from“European integration,” lagging behind while their fellow countrymen aregradually joining European middle class.

It is widely known that many Jews died in the Nazi concentrationcamps, but less known is that also about half a million Roma were gassed.Unlike the Jews, the Roma continue to face serious threats and discriminationespecially in Eastern Europe but also in Western Europe. In 2008, young Italianmen set Roma camps in Milan, Naples and Sicily on fire with Molotov cocktails.In June 2009, 65 Roma living in Belfast were forced to return to Romania afterracist attacks on their houses. These are just the stories that have made it tothe news.

The only stories I read or hear about the Roma portray them aseither criminals or helpless victims. Why does no one wonder who these peopleare and why they are one of the most hated peoples in Europe?

“They prefer to be called Roma. That is how they refer tothemselves. There is not even a word in Romani, their language,  for gypsy or nomad. These names weremade up by others,” Biser Alekov of the European Roma Grassroots OrganizationsNetwork sighs. “Actually, only a very small minority of Roma are still nomads.Most Roma have settled down.” 

The Roma have their origins in South Asia, from where theymigrated to mainly Central and Eastern Europe during the Middle Ages. Theydeveloped a nomadic lifestyle as a means of survival, earning money throughseasonal agricultural work, repairing items, clairvoyance and door-to-doorselling. At the moment, they are the largest ethnic minority in the EuropeanUnion, with about 10 to 12 million members. There is no exact number availablebecause many of them live and work illegally in other European countries.

The Roma have never had an easy time in the countries that becametheir homes. During the Nazi years, many of them were gassed in theconcentration camps and in the communist era, Roma women were forcefullysterilized. But the worst was yet to come. At least during the communist years,the Roma were sometimes given land or social support. After the fall ofcommunism, unemployment and poverty prevailed in the Roma communities. “Youcan’t imagine what poverty engulfed the Roma in my village. After 1991, Irented the village pub and was the only employed Roma. Nobody else had a job.The people began wandering around, looking for work in the towns,” Akif, a Romacurrently living in Brussels, remembers. Many Roma decided to try their luck inWestern Europe.

Since the Central and Eastern European countries joined the EU,the economic situation of many of their citizens is gradually improving. TheRoma on the other hand continue to face discrimination in education, housing,employment, healthcare and other public services.

Although it has been ruled illegal in many Eastern Europeancountries, the practices of segregating Roma children in schools or havingseparate classes for children with special needs simply because they are Roma hascontinued. In these “special” schools, they receive poorer education and havevery limited opportunities for employment or further education. In Slovakia forexample, 80 percent of children in special schools are Roma.

When a group of Croatian Roma decided to fight the practice ofsegregating Roma pupils, they managed to convince the European Court of HumanRights that this was indeed discrimination. Besides urging the Croatiangovernment to respect the principle of equality, the Court also awarded theseRoma pupils with $4,500 each. Yet, many members of the local Roma community didnot share the euphoria over this victory. They feared that the situation couldget worse for them after the court ruling.

Because of the high degree of poverty in Roma communities inEastern Europe, many live in deplorable conditions. Some feel they do not haveanother choice than to stay in illegal settlements. Once every so often, theauthorities forcibly evict the residents from their makeshift dwellings withoutoffering them adequate alternative accommodations. This of course drives themback on the streets and new illegal settlements arise faster than thebulldozers can destroy them.

It is extremely hard for Roma to get out of this vicious circlewithout a steady job. Saliha, a Roma woman from Bulgaria who came to work inBelgium explains: “Even with higher education, employers prefer Bulgarianapplicants without investigating your qualities. When they understand that youare a Roma, they stop to trust you.” Akif’s childhood dream was to become apolice officer. But when he applied after finishing secondary education, he wasnot hired, unlike his Bulgarian classmates. He was never given an explanationwhy. Tunde Buzetzky, facilitator for Decade of Roma Inclusion, confirms thatthere is strong discrimination on the labor market: “If your skin is darker,the available job is immediately gone!”

The lack of opportunities in the East convinced many Roma to moveto Western Europe. But with the growing numbers of Roma, anti-gypsyism grew inWestern Europe as well. In particular, Italy stands out for its anti-Romaattitude. In 2007, the government adopted increased “security” measures againstthe “nomad emergency.” Police was allowed to “collect data,” includingfingerprinting, exclusively nomads. Forced evictions without prior consultationor proposing adequate alternatives became more frequent. The strong anti-Romarhetoric from politicians and vilification in the media further increased thestigmatization of the Romani people, which resulted in various violent attackson Roma throughout 2008 and 2009. But in other EU countries anti-gypsyism isalso growing. Eurobarometer, a public opinion survey, has shown that nearly aquarter of all Europeans would feel uncomfortable living next to a Roma. InItaly this is half of the population.

Meanwhile, the European Union is trying hard to integrate Romaissues in its activities and many non-governmental organizations have taken onthe advocacy of the Roma. Unfortunately, all these efforts have not resulted insufficient progress. Grassroots Roma organizations strongly believe that themain reason why these policies have failed is that they were developed withoutthe participation of the Roma.

They might be right. The Bulgarian municipality of Sliven has thehighest percentage of Roma residents in the country and one of the biggest Romaghettos with 20,000 inhabitants. It works actively together with Roma NGOs,Roma experts, volunteers and informal leaders on education, housing, health andemployment issues. “This place used to be a terrible ghetto, now it’s good tolive there thanks to the inclusion of Roma in policy-making,” Alekov adds.

“Another important obstacle is the continued stereotyping. Romanipeople have been hearing for a long time that they are worthless. They havestarted to believe this themselves. Good role models are essential to motivatethem to fight for a better future for themselves and their children,” explainsBiser Alekov. He claims that it is only a small percentage of Roma that arethieves, prostitutes or beggars. “There are many Roma all over Europe that areleading or trying to lead a successful life just like other Europeans.Unfortunately many of them hide their Romani background because of the stigma.”

Alekov believes that if Europeans knew more about these Roma, theywould realize that they just want to have a decent job, live in their own houseand send their children to school, just like everyone else. His fellow Romaadvocate Buzetzky agrees that “although it would be incorrect to say that thereare no beggars or petty thieves among the Roma migrants in Western Europeancountries, most of the Roma migrants get legal jobs, send their children toschool and have a decent life. There are groups living in illegal camps underdreadful conditions. Indeed in these groups, some people may be engaged inpetty crimes.”

George Soros, whose foundation helps to improve the situation ofthe Romani people, writes in an article for The Guardian: “The keyto success is the education of a new generation of Roma who do not seek toassimilate into the general population, but deliberately retain their identityas Roma. Educated, successful Roma will shatter the prevailing negativestereotypes by their very existence.”

Fikret and Sevinch are such successful Roma. They moved to Ghent,Belgium, in 1998. Twelve years later, they own a house in a Flemishneighborhood, and have their own retail shop and construction company. Theyconsider themselves successful immigrants but stress that they had to work veryhard to get where they are today. “When we arrived, I started to work forTurkish women, to clean for them and to serve them. My husband began work onconstruction sites. After five years, we received Belgian passports, but we continuedto do the same job. However, we enrolled in language courses, because you cando nothing if you do not speak the language. Later I finished a business coursewhere I learned how to set up my own company, how to manage the retail shop,and what documents were needed. That helped me a lot,” says Fikret.  She explains that the main hurdles tolead a successful life for less fortunate Roma are that they do not speak thelanguage and that they do not know the local rules and regulations of thecountry they are staying in. They also often do not have the right documents tofind a legal job.

Mladen and Saliha came to Belgium from Bulgaria in 2007 to offertheir son a better education. They are both working as cleaners at the momentbut they have many goals and plans for the future. Mladen wants to open a smallrestaurant offering Bulgarian dishes and Saliha is looking for a job as a labassistant in the food or chemical industry. They do however still feel it isbetter to hide their Roma identity for some people out of fear of losing theirjobs.

They are not alone in this. Many of their fellow Roma keep theirethnic background a secret. They go through life as Bulgarians, Romanians,Slovakians or Kosovars. The family of Assen, who has been living in Belgium for18 years, has not yet explained to the grandchildren that they are not justBulgarians, but also Roma.

A Roma background should be something to be proud of. The cultureis very rich and goes back a long time. Unfortunately, there are many misconceptions.Begging for instance is not part of the Roma culture.  Biser Alekov says that “it is a big business and the peoplebehind it are considered as criminals by the rest of the Roma community.”

It is also commonly believed that it is part of Roma culture toforce very young girls to marry older men. Historically, weddings didtraditionally occur at an early age, between 14 and 16 for girls, but this ischanging among most Roma. Biser Alekov even claims that it is discrimination ifauthorities do not take action against the criminal act of forcing minors tomarry adult men. He claims that in these cases, the argument of “it is part oftheir culture” reinforces the stigmatization and marginalization of the Roma.

In fact, the Romani wedding is full of remarkable culturaltraditions. If the parents have not formally agreed to a wedding, the boy“abducts” the girl for a couple of days. When they return, the wedding iscelebrated. For the finale of the wedding ceremony, the young couple retires totheir room to consummate the union while the guests wait for the result: theblood traces proving that the girl was a virgin. These bloody clothes weretraditionally hung on a high place, so everyone could see that the bride wasrespectable. Today in most cases, only a symbolic form of these traditions isstill practiced.

Family and community belonging are very important to the Roma. Yourarely see old people in retirement homes. Instead, they live with theirchildren and grandchildren. When someone dies, his family stays at his side forthree days and three nights.

Roma still do not have an easy life in Europe. They arestereotyped as beggars and thieves and are not given equal opportunitiesbecause they are “Gypsies.” Once they have succeeded in overcoming the obstacles,they feel forced to hide their true identity. However, there is no need to betoo pessimistic, as Assen says: “Many will find their way. They will have towork hard on non-prestigious jobs, but if the parents do this work today,tomorrow their children – who are studying and complete local schools – willhave more opportunities. That’s how it was with other migrants, and that willhappen with us too.”

I sometimes wonder what happened to that Roma family Isaw every day in the station. One day they were gone. Have they found their wayand has someone offered them a place to stay? Or did they return disappointedto their home country?

Natalie Lefevre

Onan ordinary Wednesday morning, during one of her three-times-weekly dialysistreatments, which she calls her “dates with needles,” Janet Long’s doctor saidsomething she has not heard him say during the six years she has been living ondialysis waiting for the kidney transplant thatwill return her to independence: “My guess is that this is going to happen thissummer. I think you’ll get your transplant.”

AsDr. Raul Hernandez moved to the next patient in the next reclining chair andthe next set of vital signs on the screen above the machine with blood-filledtubes and a hemodialyzer, Melissa Miller, a registered nurse at the dialysiscenter, checked Long’s blood pressure reading.  She tells her she has heard Dr. Hernandez give only twoother predictions about transplantation to patients, both of whom weresuccessfully transplanted within weeks.

“Hewould know,” said Miller. “I don’t know how he does it. He just seems to know.”

Longsaid she was taken aback for a moment.

“I’mtrying not to get my hopes up, but that’s exciting,” said Long. “He does justcall it. I was here when he told the one he would get transplanted soon andthen he did. They called him at three in the morning, and that was it. He’snever said that to me before so he must know something. I could get my lifeback.”

Longsaid looking ahead to her day of independence from dialysis with a transplantedkidney feels “like a prisoner just being released from a sentence.”

“Ihaven’t been a part of the real world. I’ll be starting over,” said Long. “I’vebeen working as much as being on dialysis allows, part time, but I’ll have toreaccustom myself to nine to five and changing my schedule around to makesure my kids are taken care of. My priorities have changed while I’ve been aprisoner to dialysis. I’ll have a life again. You don’t go more than four dayswithout dialysis. It hinders a lot. You are very confined. I get no days off,no holidays. There’s no time off for good behavior. There is no break. I amhere three days a week for four and half hours.”

Ondialysis since December^. 10, 2004, when she was diagnosed with kidney failure, Long isn’t certain of the cause. It waslikely either from frequent strep infections the busy human resourceprofessional said she was slow to treat or chronic hypertension.

“Ithought I had the flu,” said Long. “I had been sick with something — a virus,I thought — and I couldn’t shake it. I finally went to the hospital when Icouldn’t keep anything down and at about 1:30 in the morning, I found out. Theyinserted a temporary catheter and dialysis started immediately. I knew nothingabout dialysis. None of my family had problems. It was an awakening.Fortunately, Dr. Hernandez was very open and explained everything veryhonestly. He didn’t hold anything back. That man saved my life. He’s one of thereasons I’m here. He’s a wonderful doctor. I’ll be with him for the rest of mylife, even after transplant. He has fought for me and fought for me. If youdon’t do what he tells you, you are cut loose and I understand that and Irespect that. He’s made me fight for myself, for a transplant and to get mylife back. When he walked in that first time to see me, he got a little chokedup telling me that I was in kidney failure so young and with my boys to raise.That’s what you need in a doctor. He understands where I am in my life and whatI am up against. I feel very privileged to be one of his patients.”

Oncereleased from the hospital, Long looked for information on the Internet.

“Iscared myself simple,” she said. “I don’t think you can fully understand unlessyou are experiencing it as it goes. Reading about it doesn’t tell you enough.Dialysis three times a week takes your life over. I didn’t realize how brutalit was going to be. I wasn’t used to sitting around for a long time and I don’twatch a lot of TV but that’s pretty much all you can do. I don’t sleep wellhere. Some people can, but not me. I have a full, busy life waiting for me to getout of here and live, so I get anxious. They tell you that you might have todeal with depression, but I don’t get depressed much. I have a little breakdownabout once every six months and have to get angry and cry it out and then Imove forward. It turns your whole life around. The waiting and the uncertaintyis really hard.”

TheWaiting Game

Longis far from being alone. Nationally, according to the NationalKidney Foundation, the waiting list for kidney transplants hit 100,000for the first time in 2009. To put that number in perspective, it would be asif the entire population of Green Bay, Wisconsin, were in need of a kidneytransplant. More than 4,000 are added to the waiting list each month and sadly,there will be some who die while waiting for their gift of life.

The National Kidney Foundation has launched acomprehensive initiative that aims to end the wait list over the next 10 years.Encouraging donor registries, increasing both living donations and deceasedones and eliminating barriers are part of the mission of End the Wait, whichhas been endorsed by the United Network for OrganSharing.

Longmeets the criteria to be put on the waiting list for a donated kidney, joiningmore than 11,000 in her home state of Ohio. She understands having an O+ blood type often means a longer wait on the list, sincecandidates with an O blood type can only receivean O type donation. Because type O’s are universal donors, it is less typespecific for those in need of donated organs and tissues.

Morepositively, though, advances in organ procurement techniques are making livingdonation a more viable option and recipient survival rates have improvedsignificantly. The National Kidney Foundation reports97.96 percent of transplant recipients from living donors survive one yearafter transplant and from cadaveric donors, 94.4 percent.

Livingdonors now undergo a simpler surgery than before with laparoscopic nephrectomy. In this procedure, a laparoscope is inserted intothe abdomen allowing the surgeon to see and operate, making severalsmall incisions in the abdomen, called "ports," to allowinsertion of a laparoscope and other instruments. The camera and instrumentsare used to cut the kidney away from surrounding tissue after clamping off thearteries and ureter. The kidney is removed through an incision below the bellybutton.

Hernandezsaid the recovery time from this surgery is much shorter, with fewer long-termcomplications for the living donors.

“Thesurgery for donating is much simpler now because they do it laparoscopic,” saidHernandez. “They’re back to work sometimes in three to five days.”

Hernandezsaid the quality of life for transplanted patients is vastly improved when theycan be freed from dialysis.

“Ihave over a hundred transplant patients,” he said. “I’ve got as many transplantpatients as anywhere in the state. I’d rather transplant them all. I’d preferthat to coming in to a dialysis center. This is the part of my job I don’tlike.”

MelissaMiller comes into work every day at the dialysis center as a registered nurseon the front line for both the patients waiting for transplant and for thosewho don’t meet the criteria, who will live out their lives on dialysis.

“Ofcourse I wish they could all be transplanted, too, but I’m here for them,” saidMiller, who added that switching gears between patients and maintainingprofessional boundaries is often hard. “I was drawn to working here becauseI’ve had problems with my kidneys in the past. I didn’t have problems to theextent that these patients do, but I think my experience gave me a betterunderstanding of what they go through. I’m happy here, but sometimes it’s hardnot to take your work with you when you go home. You really get to know yourpatients in this setting. You know about their life and they know about yours.It’s a relationship. You celebrate with them when things are going well andyou’re happy when they are one of the lucky ones who get transplanted and theyget their life back. At the same time, you miss them when they don’t have to behere anymore. When things go wrong and they can get really bad really quickly,you have to be able to react professionally. You take an individual directionwith each patient on a day to day basis. You get attached and it would beeasier to just be technically focused, you know, put them on treatment, takethem off treatment and watch their numbers. It’s hard to separate yourself fromthe work and you take it to heart. That’s what it’s all about, though, intaking a holistic approach to nursing, you have to take the whole person intoconsideration and you have to be able to get in touch with who they are andcare about them all as if they were family. It becomes a way of life. I got alittle teary hearing what Dr. Hernandez told Janet this morning. I want thisfor her so much, even though I’ll miss taking care of her and being with her.”

AFamily Affair

Nowhaving helped her father to the other side of dependence on dialysis, RachelYoung had watched as her father’s health and options while living on dialysisdwindled.

“Atfirst he didn’t want either one of us, me or my sister, to have anything to dowith being tested,” said Young. “He was apprehensive, and when a couple otherpeople were tested and nothing came of it, he was put on the waiting list. Hewas on home dialysis five times a day and he was beginning to really get sick.He was told that it could be two or three years before it was likely that hewould get a transplant. At that point in time, I said that it didn’t matter ifhe liked the idea or not, I was going to get tested.”

Youngsaid she was free from any ties, unlike her sister who is a mother to a littlegirl.

“Isaid, let me go ahead and see if I’m a match and we would go from there,” saidYoung.

Thetesting process is exhaustive, Young explained, and took months to complete. Inthe end, she was a match for her father.

“Itwas hard not knowing if I was going to be a match,” she said. “That was harderthan the surgery itself. The team at Ohio State won’t look at doing it unlessthey think there’s an almost 100 percent chance that things are going to gowell and you’re going to recover fully. It was an emotional rollercoaster, thatnot knowing and the ups and the downs of the unknown.”

Younglearned she was a match on a Monday and the surgery was performed just fourdays later on Friday morning.

“Upuntil a few days before, I wasn’t sure yet that I was a good match,” she said.“That was probably the hardest thing of everything overall that I had to dealwith. Once I knew, the doctors answered all my questions and really helped putme at ease. They said I would fully recover and I would be able to lead anormal life. Other than only being able to take Tylenol for pain becauseibuprofen and a lot of the other drugs are hard on your kidneys, there weren’ta lot of stipulations. The surgery went really well. I woke up and wascomfortable and very aware of my surroundings. I got back on my feet reallyquickly.”

Oneof the first things Young did was to go down the hall and see how her dad wasdoing.

“Itwas amazing how quickly I recovered,” she said. “I had pain but it wasmanageable. I was there when my dad came out of surgery and I was able to seehim. It was great. He was doing really well.”

Youngwas discharged from the hospital on the Sunday of that same weekend, and herrecovery was uneventful.

“Thereis an initial shock as the remaining kidney and your liver adjust to the onekidney being gone, but overall, I felt pretty good,” she said. “I took my timerecovering at home and did a lot of sleeping. I was off of pain medication inthat first week and able to drive after two weeks.”

Youngsaid she and her father had a close relationship before, but the surgerybrought them even closer.

“Wewere close to begin with, but now he makes sure to thank me every time he talksto me, every time he emails me or calls me,” she said. “At first I think he hadsome guilt about having me do this. It wasn’t up to him, though. He had nochoice in what I was going to do. I was going to do it and that was it. It wasdefinitely hard for him.”

Youngsaid her father is doing well now.

“He’sdoing great,” she explained. “His levels are mostly back to normal. They are alittle high, but for his condition, they are where they need to be. They arereally happy with his recovery. He’s golfing now, he’s doing all his own yardwork and he’s working full time again. He bounced back and he looks ten yearsyounger. He looks and acts totally brand new.”

Uncomfortablebeing labeled as a hero for her decision to donate her kidney, Young said sheis happy to talk to anyone considering living donation.

“Mydad and I joke that now he owes me for life, but that’s not really how I seeit. It was the only choice I could make,” she said. “We had a lot of talksabout this and he said that he would have done the same in my situation. I hopemy story can educate people and encourage organ donation,either way, living or not. Many people talk about the guilt associated withneeding an organ that would come from someone who had passed on. So many thatI’ve talked to through the donor network have said that it gave meaning totheir loved one’s passing, that something good came out of it. That’s somethingthat’s hard to understand, especially if you are the one that is needing thatgift of life and you aren’t used to having to ask for anything. If you aren’tcomfortable checking the box on your driver’s license, then do talk to yourfamily because ultimately it comes down to something happening to you; theywill have to know and make that decision. It’s a great thing. For me, I don’tthink anything of that whole hero thing; I just know that it is something thatso many people would do in the same situation. It’s just something that you cando for someone that you care about and there’s a real need.”

StillWaiting

WhileJanet Long waits for her day of independence from dialysis, she keeps the donorbox on her license checked.

“Imade that decision a year before I found out what was going on with me,” saidLong. “I don’t know why I hadn’t done it before, but I just decided that ifsomething was to happen to me, that someone should benefit. It’s still checked.Even now, there is still something on me that someone could use and ifsomething happens to me, I’ll want that. I don’t know what made me change mymind, but I chose to check that box and I won’t uncheck it. I can only imaginewhat it feels like to receive an organ or how somebody feels when one isoffered, but just the idea that somebody would want to do that, to make that giftis overwhelming. The idea that there is something like that for me and thatsomeone will make that gift and give me my life and my independence back haschanged me. I know I’ll get there. You just can’t give up.”

Lori Meyer Law

The greasy dishes pile onto our long narrow table at the Thai restaurant in Queens. We are celebrating the college graduation of my cousin Jeffrey, sitting across from me; the 70th birthday of my father, sitting beside me; and the 60th birthday of my uncle, sitting at the opposite end of the table, where I prefer him. My brother, sister-in-law, and aunt and uncle from my mother’s side are here too. Another glass of wine is poured, and someone asks my uncle if he wants to say something. I realize this is his cue to make a speech. After sitting through much of the meal in silence, he lets out a frail voice in accented English, his cheeks pulled into a smile so forced, it must be sincere.

A family dinner with my uncle is a rare occurrence, even though he lives with my mother and father in the apartment where I was raised. He usually makes every effort not to be inside the house when my parents have dinner, perhaps because he thinks eating their food is the one burden he can spare them.

Evolution of an Illness

Since he came to live with us several years ago, my uncle’s presence has evolved from a crisis to a quiet nuisance. These days, he spends most of his limited energy trying to make himself easy to ignore. He takes long walks, returning late at night with his grim, loping gait. He sleeps most of the day. Or when he is anxious, he may lie awake in his dark room for hours on damp sheets.

In return for his efforts to imitate old furniture, my parents accept his sickness and accept he will not get better. That’s more than many in our family are willing to admit, as evidenced by the boxes of vitamins and herbal supplements that have piled up in his room, sent by other relatives with notes of courteous concern.

Though his presence is irksome, my parents know we’re relatively lucky, because my uncle’s illness is not the kind that leads to violent outbursts or deep hallucinations. For years, his medication simply deadened his mind into a state of near-catatonia, underscored by the 40-some-odd pounds he put on as a side effect of the drugs. His brain has limbered up somewhat recently since he started taking a different pill. But his other main symptom remains: his silence, the invasive hush hovering over the apartment like a quivering moth.

While the family’s social contract with my uncle has brought quiet resignation, his diagnosis has helped us make sense of him—more to our benefit than to his. Until then, no one quite knew why, for as long as anyone could remember, he had refused to show any degree of warmth toward other human beings. During his marriage, faint hints of the crisis surfaced at quickening intervals. My uncle’s wife sometimes confided in my parents about his cruel detachment and revealed how, contrary to his family’s hopes, marriage had failed to cure him of his coldness. Jeffrey grew up learning how to ignore and be ignored by his father.

Later, no one could explain why my uncle avoided my grandfather as he lay on his death bed, despite his wish to see his youngest son before expiring, as if a final visit would redeem some of the shame of not raising him right. He was the shame of a proud family that, despite having survived war and poverty and revolution, somehow just couldn’t fix this one ingrate son.

Finding a Language

We issued our own diagnosis first: guai, a catch-all Chinese phrase for weird, strange, and deviant. My parents chalked up his withdrawn nature to a mixture of apathy and a flawed personality. They tried to push him to be a better husband, to be more responsible and affectionate. But after the divorce and the loss of his dead-end office job, not too long after September 11, when he dissolved into babbling paranoia and refused to come out of his apartment for days, and soon had to be forcibly removed and committed to Bellevue… at that point, guai no longer sufficed. 

There is a term for schizophrenia in Chinese, but it doesn’t carry the same currency as it does in English. Like the disease itself, it doesn’t translate well.

My uncle was more talkative when he first arrived from the hospital. Though the paranoia had eased by then, fear would well up in him at night, and he had a habit of jumping out of bed to kneel and pray for forgiveness before my grandfather’s framed photograph in the living room.

Between his convulsions of guilt, my uncle complained. His grumblings were as bland and monotonous as his spirit, but still they ground down my parents’ nerves. He griped about constant insomnia, or about feeling ill and weak with some un-diagnosable ailment. He pestered my parents to give him a job at their store, insisting this would relieve his restlessness. He worried that Jeffrey wasn’t doing all his homework, that Jeffrey’s hair was too long, that Jeffrey would catch a cold because he didn’t wear a hat, and that his mother wasn’t keeping a careful eye on him.

But no, when we asked him in exasperation, he wouldn’t call or meet with his son, or visit him at college. Just as he refused to change his pants or get a haircut.  He deflected anger with blankness. Over time, the complaints ebbed into silence, and we didn’t miss his voice.

Today, the disturbance has calmed down to a low growl, the white noise we’ve all learned to block out. I often pass him on the street in my neighborhood and scarcely make eye contact, rather I let him fade into the city’s anonymous backdrop.  Perhaps in another context this would be a sign of family dysfunction. But the dividend we extract from my uncle’s dependency is the convenient assumption that whatever is wrong with our collective relationship, it is always wrong with him.

My uncle has taught my family a new language of avoidance. My mother and father cope in creative ways. They assign him rote tasks: watering the plants or doing sit-ups before bed. At times, they seem to relish yelling at him—about his reluctance to shower and shave; his fatness; the sweat that beads up on his greasy forehead because he wears long sleeves and sweaters regardless of the weather; and how he eats the same dull breakfast every day, bread and milk, like he’s still institutionalized. With almost puerile vigor, they’ve teased him about his various tics—the tuneless humming under his breath when he chews, the involuntary muscle contractions rocking him back and forth and making him limply stroke his belly, as if strumming a guitar.
 
I no longer see the point in trying to convince my parents this kind of treatment is not very therapeutic for schizophrenia patients. I know it provides a cathartic outlet as they struggle to fit him into a half-lit corner of their lives. And I’m not entitled to criticize; I yell at him too sometimes, after all. And unlike them, I don’t have to breathe the stifling air his illness seeps into their home each day.

My mother sometimes lashes out with subtle hostility. Over dinner, she’ll yell at him for being too timid in reaching out for the fish on the far end of the table—she hates his craven reluctance to ask for anything, as if he’s afraid of becoming emotionally indebted to us. One night she denounced him for not visiting an ailing relative, reminding him of how he abandoned his own parents, and the withering denouncement prompted him to make the trip. Mostly, she rages against his less consequential tics: She’s excoriated him once for not throwing away the box for the tube of toothpaste. Normal people don’t leave open toothpaste boxes; they throw them in the trash. My uncle would generally say nothing and comply, but it isn’t the nonsensical habits that bothered her, but the indifference, the emotional opacity, that gives him an unnerving leverage over us.

My father focuses on keeping my uncle occupied. He urges him to write Chinese calligraphy each day as a form of therapy. Lately, my uncle has become somewhat livelier and talkative—we think it’s because he switched medications—and the recommendations have become more ambitious. My uncle now writes regular diary entries, which my father sometimes reads to monitor his progress. When my father encouraged his brother half-seriously to take martial arts classes with an old master we know from Chinatown, my uncle, who moves like he just emerged from a body cast, stayed quiet. He allows his caregivers the comfort of having urged him to do something, knowing they don’t expect, maybe don’t even want him to really respond.

The New Normal

There have been minor triumphs in recent months since he switched to the new medicine.  He might remark at dinner on the food being too spicy, instead of just chewing mutely. He used to eat only bananas as his evening snack, and now he throws in the occasional apple or orange.

One evening, I asked my uncle if, after about five years, he had become the longest-running student in his day treatment group. He told us many people had been there far longer. My father joked about how long it was taking those students to “get better.” No, I say, it’s about managing the illness, reaching a point where it’s no longer getting worse. You still don’t understand you can’t cure these things, I said. They nod quietly, and my uncle says nothing. The lull dangles in our queer emotional stasis.

As a reporter, when writing about mental health issues, I’ve researched the concept of cultural competency. I’ve interviewed clinicians and advocates about Western mental health care’s failures in working with immigrant households, who often are reluctant to seek professional treatment and have difficulty grasping the idea there is no real cure. Researchers say Asian American families face special challenges due to different concepts of family cohesion, which tend to subjugate the individual will to the communal. Mental health issues in Asian American communities have historically been ignored or misunderstood, burdened by stigma, shame, and a lack of access to culturally sensitive treatment programs.

Still, I can never seem to graft that analysis onto the case study unfolding in my parents’ living room. We’re not ignorant people who think my uncle is cursed or evil. We’re not ashamed. Somehow the disdain my parents heap on him feels justified. He is irritating, unpleasant, and he is constantly there. Before he went crazy, he frustrated us in ways no one else really understood.
We may understand him better now that his personality bears a psychiatric label.

We understand ourselves less; my father’s unshakeable commitment to his brother seems to push the bounds of sanity at times, even if we couldn’t imagine it any other way. Maybe it runs in the family.

I go back to his birthday. Tonight, we rest. We’re at the Thai restaurant in Queens, two generations celebrating two birthdays and a graduation. Two middle-aged brothers face each other across the long table, balding and content. Tonight, my uncle toasts to his son Jeffrey.

He’s happy that everyone is together here, he says, and he’s proud.

I try to focus on his words and not the wheezy thinness of his voice as my mouth pulls into something just shy of a smile. Mired in the moment’s dense awkwardness is this fragile pride we all feel—an emotion pressed flat and smooth by exhaustion.

Michelle Chen

In the lot next to the American Airlines terminal a Muslim man seated on a milk crate is splashing his face with cold water from a jug. He pours it over his bare feet and both hands and then passes the container so his neighbor can do the same. Before them, eight rows of yellow taxis, inching toward LaGuardia Airport in a self-inflicted traffic jam. The men are cab drivers, and they are preparing to pray. Here, in the airport’s taxi holding lot, Muslim cabbies deposit their cars after they’ve delivered their passengers. They ritually purify themselves, either in the restroom or outside with the water jug, and circle around the back of the snack stand, where rugs have been laid out on the pavement. Facing east, toward Mecca, they prostrate themselves before the Divine.

It is raining heavily this evening, but shifts of shoeless men are kneeling in the open air all the same. Thousands of them will have passed through here by the end of the day. In the stall, the snack vendor sells halal rice and instant noodle soup. The dingy tiles of his stand are covered in black marker: ‘Ford Esquire 2008 for sale’ and ‘Need Day Driver.’ The devout pray quickly, streaming in and out of the space every few minutes, and when they are done, return wet to their cars and join the line of cabs headed back to the city. It is time again for work.

Roughly half of New York City’s 40,000 taxi drivers are Muslim. They are itinerants, and their destination is rarely a matter of personal choice. But they are also followers of Islam, practitioners faithful to a call to pray that sounds five times a day. Muslim prayer is not particularly straightforward: It involves ablution followed by a series of  prostration positions carried out in a relatively clean space. The prayer itself rarely takes more than ten minutes, but it must be performed on time. There are five periods of worship; some periods last longer than others. The maghrib prayer period typically begins at sunset and only goes on for about forty minutes; the isha’a prayer period begins around 9 p.m. and stretches until dawn. Sometimes the drivers are forced to forfeit passengers, sometimes to take roundabout routes in the search for an appropriate site. In desperate times, devotees bring out a small rug they keep in the trunk and pray in the backseat. Most have memorized a city-wide circuit of improvised prayer spaces that suffice when one cannot reach a mosque. As one cabbie told me emphatically, “The most important thing is not to let the prayer expire. Just park and do it.”

I have, for a long time, been interested in how religious rituals are modified to suit modern circumstance, perhaps because I’ve adapted a good number of them myself. Sociologists of religion often cite Muslim cabbie prayer strategies as exemplifying the ways in which immigrants blaze new religious trails in cosmopolitan cities like New York. When I first began to talk to Muslim taximen, I was under the impression they were tailoring their faith to meet the demands of their job. It seemed to me they were taking a rather stringent, age-old rite and, to some extent, bending it to suit the new and diverse religious landscape in which they now find themselves. But I no longer think that is the case. The drivers are tailoring their job to meet the demands of their faith. The recently-arrived immigrants I have encountered, young men from Islamabad, Istanbul and Alexandria, do not feel much of a difference between the prayer program they ascribed to back home and the one they follow in New York, save for the seamy state of so many of the mosques here. They do not feel they are making a sacrifice. More exactly, there is a sacrifice being made, but what they are giving up is not service to God. It comes in the form of parking tickets, lost fares, and a seven-day work week.

To better understand the ritual life of men on the move, I spent 11 days riding with eight Muslim taxi drivers, traveling through New York City neighborhoods, from Long Island to the Upper West Side. In their cabs they spoke to me about the challenges and impromptu resolutions that make up a religiously-committed driver’s shift. And they showed me, as well, pointing through the front windows at their own prayer haunts, at men streaming into mosques and the double-parked taxis they leave worriedly behind them. As we wound through congested avenues, I rested in the back seat, helping them scan the streets for a place to stop. I watched them sprint from their cars and then pray calmly, quietly. En route, minutes and seconds are of the essence. In prayer, all anxiety seems to dissipate. 

Improvising

Mirza Iqbal, 53, drives me back to my Manhattan apartment from LaGuardia when he is finished praying. He is an elegant-looking man with a coarse white beard and a pale skullcap. His face is leathery, his voice gentle and low. Iqbal came to Brooklyn from Pakistan 20 years ago and has been a taxi driver ever since. His shift begins at 5 p.m. and, on Fridays and weekends, might run until 4 a.m. We review prayer basics. Muslims can pray absolutely anywhere, even bowed over on the side of the road. “God doesn’t say the ground is dirty,” he tells me. But it is considered advantageous to pray in a group. “We usually try to make it together. The together prayer is better than the alone prayer.” Iqbal has only had to pray in his car twice. One of these times, he dropped a passenger off in New Jersey and, on his way back to the city, ran into heavy traffic. He was forced to stop at a rest area off the highway and perform the rite there. The cabbie has learned to calculate which way is east in a hurry.

Iqbal prays in the mosque if he can. There are over 400 scattered throughout the five boroughs and Long Island, and one of the biggest, a mosque on Coney Island Avenue that has been under construction for almost six months, is right next to his home.  He usually does his morning prayer there, at 5:30 a.m., before going to sleep for the day. New York’s largest mosque is the Islamic Cultural Center (popularly referred to as the “96th Street Mosque”) on 3rd Avenue between 96th and 97th streets. Should Iqbal find himself back on the Upper East Side in a couple of hours, he will stop there. If he can find a space, that is. “Parking is the big problem for us,” he says. “Sometimes we make round, make round, make round. If you’re lucky, you find.”

Landing a parking spot is the chief anxiety of every Muslim taxi driver in this town. The hunt is a critical deciding factor when it comes to selecting a prayer space, second in weight only to the whims of the passenger. Cab drivers used to be able to double-park on 97th at prayer time without repercussions, but the police have begun again to dole out tickets. Some cabbies try to fight the fine by bringing a notice to traffic court from the mosque testifying that they were present for prayer services.  But last year, after Iqbal found a $115 ticket on his windshield, he just paid up. “It doesn’t make sense to pay $115 when I make less than $200 per day. So I try to find meter parking, where it’s legal. Some people still double-park. They take a chance.” And on that note, Mirza Iqbal leaves me in front of my door and begins to look for his next fare.

 
Short-Term Spaces

In a nondescript Pakistani restaurant on Church Street in Tribeca, South Asian women serve up curried meat and spinach cafeteria-style. Behind them, in a dark kitchen, someone is cooking over fire. The New Shezan Restaurant looks almost like a small, seedy family living room: There is always a handful of people drinking chai tea and watching, from a single table, the Indian version of “So You Think You Can Dance?” on a suspended television set. The occasional unrelated customer wanders in, eats a samosa, and wanders out. Until evening comes. At a quarter past seven something strange happens. Men begin to file in—Bluetooth still in left ear, car keys still in right hand—en masse. They do not greet anyone, just head promptly to the restroom, toward the back, to wash themselves and then proceed down an obscured set of stairs. Soon there is a long line for the lavatory, but no one in the restaurant, least of all the women behind the counter, seems to notice. There must be a hundred of them in the basement by now.

The stairs are narrow and force visitors to duck down low or risk knocking their heads on the ceiling. At the bottom, a mountain of onions and potatoes in mesh sacks. I climb over the vegetables and take a look around: not a taxi driver in sight, only sealed boxes and a few garbage bags. And then a cabbie who has followed me down opens a concealed door to a very large and immaculate room painted in fluorescent green. There is a shower stall in the room and a modest library of books on Islam. Fans, loud speakers and Muslim calendars detailing prayer times are fastened to the walls; a donation box sits in a corner. The men have left their shoes in wooden cubbyholes. They stand, kneel and stretch out on the carpeted floor, and then they leave almost as suddenly as they came in, making room for the newly-arrived.

Mohammad Malik, 38, wears a black baseball cap and has decided to move with his family to Houston this summer. It is nearly 8 p.m., and he is driving me from the New Shezan Restaurant to an art vernissage on West 56th Street. Malik has been in the United States since 2000, but was only able to bring his wife and three daughters over from Pakistan a year ago. It took him that long to become a citizen. Houses are cheaper in Houston, he says, and the city is calmer. “The big problem in New York is that you don’t have time for your family. When I come to my job at 5 p.m., my daughters are just getting back from the school. And when I come back to the house, they are asleep. And when they go to the school, I’m asleep. But at least they’re with me now.” Malik cannot even find a place to park the cab in his own Brooklyn neighborhood when his shift is over. The only spaces available at three in the morning are metered ones, meaning that he has to wake up at 8 a.m. to move the car. He plans on changing jobs in Texas.

Malik prays at least once a shift at New Houston Auto Repair, a garage at the corner of Houston and Lafayette. His friend, the owner of the shop, has set up a small prayer room there and it isn’t too difficult to find a space nearby. “Prayer time begins in seven minutes,” he tells me. “I’ll drop you and go downtown to the garage. There’s so many mosques in Manhattan, but there’s no parking. And this prayer time is a short one; if you’re late, the prayer expires.” He never parks illegally “because then your concentration is not on the prayer. It’s not worth it. If you’re going for the worship then all your focus should be towards the prayer, not the parking.” Often, when he is running behind schedule, he prays inside the car. “God knows your conditions,” he says. “Money, you know, you can make it. But when the prayer is gone, it’s gone.” He turns on his off-duty sign as I get out of the cab.

The next day at 5:10 p.m. Malik is washing his feet in the black sink at Houston Auto. A taxi with its hood popped open blocks the entrance. Two more are propped up in the air, mechanics in navy blue uniforms laboring underneath them. It is little and unapologetically greasy, the way most garages are. The workers do not seem bothered by Malik, who balances on one leg as he scrubs the other. He leads me up some unstable metal steps like a fire escape, to a  closet-sized room with Oriental rugs on the floor. He will do his asar prayer here and then start his shift. Today he is alone, but often he prays together with four or five other drivers—I cannot imagine how they all fit in here—and then they share food they bring from home. Anyone is welcome to use the prayer space; no one has to announce himself. “In the winter my friend puts the heat on and in the summer we got a fan,” Malik tells. It is storming out this afternoon and I think of the drivers caught at the airport. I ask Malik if they’ll pray behind the snack stand even in this weather. “We don’t care; we just pray.”

The vendor who works behind the counter at the LaGuardia snack stand calls himself Henry. He is an excited man from Bangladesh, who smiles even when he is angry, and has been feeding taxi drivers for the last 15 years. One evening, as the maghrib prayer period begins, Henry offers me a coffee and takes me around the back of his stall. About 30 men are standing with their heads bowed; one has taken on the part of the imam and is reciting the prayer aloud in Arabic. He points to a long tar-like smear near the roof. It takes a little while, but soon I understand that Henry affixed an awning to the stand to protect the praying cabbies from rain and snow about a year ago. He bought the covering himself from Home Depot and hired builders to help put it up. The entire operation cost him $5,000, which he paid out of his own pocket. The awning was up for almost a month when the Port Authority noticed and had the drivers take it down. Now the canopy is sitting in his living room at home. Henry doesn’t have much to say about it. He just keeps shaking his head. “Port Authority say no. They come here and they say no.”

The operations supervisor at LaGuardia tells me the Port Authority discovered the snack stand awning when a maintenance truck sideswiped it by accident. He explains that the drivers are not authorized to build anything on airport property. “What if every religion wanted to pray out there in the lot?” he asks heatedly. “This isn’t a place for prayer; it’s an airport. The Muslim drivers can’t just change the entire environment of a place that doesn’t belong to them. It might snowball.” If they wanted, they could submit a tenant alteration application, he says. But this would entail putting forward an entire architectural plan and “that’s not a cheap thing to do.” 

The cabbies also pray in a nook near the Delta Air Lines terminal, below an overpass. The supervisor recalls they once tried to build flooring there out of sheets of plywood to avoid praying on the gravel. “It was a trip hazard. And it was right next to the walkway. Imagine, three feet from the sidewalk!  People were scared to walk there; we got complaints. You know, with all this terrorist stuff . . . People mistakenly think they’re terrorists. And their carpets shouldn’t be there either; they’re going to be gone, too. Why can’t you just keep your rug in your car? Those rugs could be a sanitary hazard; they look like garbage to me. Listen, this airport is nondenominational. That’s why we stop religious people from soliciting in the hallways. I’d like to go to church during the day, I’m a religious man. But I have to go to work instead. If you need to pray all day, maybe taxi driver just isn’t the right job for you.”

The Ritual Rush

On Friday afternoons at half past one peddlers selling Arabic CDs, elaborate floor mats, dates, imported cookies and wall plaques bearing the name of the Prophet line Third Avenue on the Upper East Side. A man with a halal food pushcart positions himself strategically in front of the entrance to the “96th Street Mosque” and waits for the rush. The Friday prayer, or jumu’ah prayer, replaces the regular afternoon dhuhr prayer. The most significant prayer of the week, Muslim men are required to perform it in congregation. The ornate turquoise room on the upper level of the Islamic Cultural Center—used only on Fridays and Islamic holidays—holds 1,000 worshippers at capacity. The smaller space on the main floor can accommodate 400. But there are still more devotees, and they spill out onto the lawn in front of the mosque’s open door so they can hear the imam’s recitation. Men, women and children kneel in the grass. Every few seconds a straggler runs hysterically down the sidewalk and toward the imposing dome to join them, tossing off his shoes.

The stream of people that push out of the Center’s double doors when the prayer is over does not subside for nearly 20 minutes. The street vendors begin to call out; a man standing on a cardboard box begins to preach loudly. Older women in full hijab hold out cups and paper bags for handouts. Men rattle donation boxes and passersby stuff bills inside.  A patrolling traffic control officer tells me they are still willing to turn a blind eye to illegally parked cars on Fridays at prayer time. (The officers are obligated to write out tickets if someone complains about their car being blocked.) Taxicabs are double-parked all the way down 97th Street. One is triple-parked. It looks like a Muslim funfair.

Out on the Street

The Mobil gas station on 51st Street and 11th Avenue seems empty. The West African man who usually sits behind the counter is outside pumping gas into someone’s Volkswagen. Inside, where the cash register and assorted snacks are, it is completely silent. But in the adjoining car service area taxi drivers are in prayer, holed up in a threadbare room that might once have held windshield washer fluid and oil. The station’s aged Pakistani manager prefers to kneel out in the open on two wooden boards covered with rugs. He is crouched underneath shelves that hold rubber tires. The station attendant, Omar Ouedraogo, 46, counted 200 the one time he kept track of how many cabbies came in to pray throughout the day. The nearby mosque, on 44th Street, only opens its doors in ten-minute spurts; it closes immediately after every prayer, rejecting the idea of the longer, more lenient prayer period. It is also known for kicking out devotees who lag behind. Ouedraogo says this is often the case in New York. Delayed drivers find themselves at the gas station.

Often they park up on the sidewalk in front of the fuel pumps, ready to risk a fine because the prayer only takes a few short moments. “Everyday someone gets a ticket,” Ouedraogo shrugs, and nods toward a circling police car. But policemen are welcome to pray in the space too, and some of them show up from time to time. Ouedraogo doesn’t get parking tickets, but even he has been chastised by the officers. “I’ve been doing the nightshift here for two years,” he tells me. “I work by myself, no one else. And I always open the door for people who want to come in and pray. The police have come to complain. What if one time I let someone in and something happens accidentally? It’s hard. I let everyone in at the risk of my own safety. But my boss set this up to give Muslims the opportunity to pray. Sometimes I lock the door so I have the chance to see who’s coming in, but then I have to open the door twenty, thirty times a night. Sometimes I’m outside pumping gas and I forget someone’s inside. But you know, the people just pray and there’s never a problem.”

Less than a ten-minute walk away, in Times Square, Omer Ozkaya, 25, meets tourists coming out of Broadway shows and takes them to the bars or back to their hotels in his bicycle rickshaw. He arrived from Turkey four months ago (“I am a New Yorker,” he beams) hoping to do a master’s degree in mechanical engineering. Instead he takes English language lessons in the morning and rides his cycle into the night. Often he prays in the car park on 43rd Street and Sixth Avenue, where his boss keeps the bicycles. “Sometimes the personnel don’t like,” he says. “I need water to wash so I have to use the restroom, and I have to ask the personnel to open the restroom every time. I don’t want to bother them, but you have to do it if you believe.”

Tonight Ozkaya prays at the mosque on 29th Street between Broadway and Fifth Avenue. It is dark out and there are no women here but me. The entrance to the mosque is like a recessed storefront and the house of worship is surrounded on all sides by dingy linoleum-floored restaurants. Post-prayer, hundreds of men rush Chandni, the largest eatery. They emerge with pita bread stuffed with meat and overrun the sidewalk. The mosque is open from 11:45 p.m. until midnight; when it is closed, practitioners pray in the restaurants. All of the surrounding streets are yellow with parked taxis. A cabbie who has been circling for nearly 15 minutes finally gets out of his car, moves a bicycle rickshaw onto the walkway and parks in the now vacant spot. The bicycle driver, livid, begins to bang with his hands on the taxi’s windshield. Most of the men look tired and fed up. Facing the mosque is a vast, vacant parking lot. But lots aren’t free.

It is difficult trying to negotiate a nomadic existence and the fickle demands of faith, hard on the spirit and, in the coldest months, hard on the body. They earn little, these drivers, and put up with too much. But, in an important way, they are free. They are not caged in cubicles or behind counters. They do not need to slink off and pray in office restrooms, risk being fired for neglecting shoppers. Rather than being the wrong job for people who need to pray, taxi driving seems in many ways the right one. The cab drivers have an off-duty sign and they can turn it on whenever they like. They have the freedom not to amend a ritual they want to go unchanged. “I worked in the restaurant for one day,” Ozkaya tells me. “And even the owner is Muslim. I told him I want—no, I have—to pray. I don’t want to break it. But he told me you can’t do it because customers might come.” Ozkaya has decided he won’t stay in New York City very long. Just long enough to kneel down by his bicycle in Central Park in the heat of summer.

Related links:

www.30mosques.com

Hillary Eve Brenhouse

Last November was unusually warm and sunny at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign until the morning of November 16, when a crowd of graduate students sporting ponchos, rain boots, and GEO signs and buttons swarmed the main Quad in the chilly rain. It was almost 7:45 a.m., and very few of us were used to being on campus that early on a Monday, or on any day.

The 8 a.m. teaching times are hardly coveted. We had prepared for this, though, and would not have missed it: we had been exchanging e-mail and Facebook messages on where to find the best raincoats and ponchos, and what to bring for snacks (and figuring out where we might use the restroom); we knew to have T-shirts, buttons, and signs, but that nothing with sticks were allowed.

During this kick-off of the Graduate Employees’ Union (GEO) strike, we could hold umbrellas to shield ourselves from the icy drops, but those umbrellas would have to be folded when we broke into groups to picket the large campus buildings around the Quad. It should have come as no surprise to the administration or the local and statewide media that the graduate students turned out in such numbers under such conditions, and not just because of the lingering, “Yes we can” mentality from the Obama campaign, or the rebellious allure of standing up for ourselves during a time when so much in the current economic and academic environment seems out of control, and definitely out of our control.

Trouble brewing

Disseminated over the previous week, the plan was clear: The administration’s representatives would sit down for a bargaining session — the 19th over this contract — with GEO’s bargaining unit, lead by history graduate student Kerry Pimblott, the weekend before the pending strike, and should they not reach a tentative agreement, we would strike.

Despite its distance from campus, a few hundred graduate students gathered for a rally outside the Institute of Aviation at Willard Airport, and several dozen crammed into the negotiation room a very small lecture hall. The issues on the table were various, and they seemed to reflect the economic mood of the country in general, and the state of Illinois in particular: The key points of the contract aimed to preserve current labor opportunities and tuition waivers.

The ‘f’ word on everyone’s mind in late 2009 was furloughs — mandatory time off work without pay — which no other union on campus had been able to negotiate out of their new contracts, and perhaps this would be the stickiest issue to hammer out. However, by the end of the long evening at the airport during which an agreement was reached on increase in the university’s contribution to graduate student healthcare premiums, on parental leaves, on dropping furloughs from the proposed contract, and on gradual raises to the minimum salary, the final point of contention between the administration and GEO had become the contract’s language regarding tuition waivers. Presented by the administration as a non-issue, the security of tuition waivers supports the very ability of the university to attract top graduate students as well as the ability of the most talented and deserving students to pursue graduate education.

The debate seemed further complicated by the verbiage that GEO demanded clarified: The existing language did not explicitly guarantee the waiver of the entire tuition amount, only the base rate, and this posed a threat to the graduate students from other states as well as other countries whose rate of tuition could have jumped higher than the minimum salary, making graduate school simply unaffordable for many current students. We were happy with the advances our bargaining team had made, but there was no way that we would accept a compromise on tuition waivers.

There had been previous signs of trouble on that front: the university had considered eliminating tuition waivers for graduate students working the least hours as graduate assistants (and thus making the smallest salary); they had rescinded tuition waivers to undergraduate TAs in chemistry. For some this seemed like a petty point, and I heard more than one undergraduate complain about how graduate students already got paid to go to school, and now they insisted on free tuition as well. I did my best to explain how it all works, that we don’t in fact get paid to go to school, but to work. We teach over 23% of all the undergraduate classes at UIUC. I usually teach four classes a year, two each semester, and if I deducted my tuition from my annual pay, I’d be left with –$4,247.

The strike begins

So we kicked off the strike in the rain, and continued to picket in the rain all day. The lines consisted not only of graduate assistants but also their partners, former graduate students, non-tenure-track faculty, and professors. Further down the line from me was English professor Cary Nelson, the President of the American Association of University Professors, who had called graduate students and collective bargaining “the only hope for the universities of the future” the week before at a GEO rally.

We each marched during the shifts we’d signed up for, and I suspect that many of us spent time at the picket lines outside of those shifts, too.  (We’d later Facebook about our various pains and aches, declaring it all worth it.) Facebook and Twitter updates about how the strike was going, sent from cell phones in picket lines, kept everyone informed, and the comments of encouragement and solidarity came not only from current students at UIUC and elsewhere, but from former graduate student workers as well whose leadership and hard work had created our labor union in the early 1990s, and whose efforts made these negotiations possible since the GEO was voted in as the official representative of graduate student labor at the University in 2003.

The second day of the strike dawned as rainy and windy as the first, but the picket lines remained strong and loud, with anticipation for new from the next bargaining session set for that morning. Looking around me, I saw perhaps even more enthusiasm than the day before. There was not just marching and chanting, but also singing and dancing.

Still, standing and walking around in the cold and the rain was getting to me a bit, but mostly because I felt misunderstood. While the campus newspaper was publishing accounts from both the administration and the GEO, but I was frustrated at what I called “the fear talk,” regarding the strike. After all, GEO had informed the media about the strike, and we’d all talked to our students about it ahead of time.

Yet the picketing itself and the empty classrooms were depicted as frightening: One headline for The Daily Illini answered valid questions about what undergraduate students might encounter during the strike in a piece that purportedly addressed “the rising fears about GEO strike” (none of my students or the students I saw walking by — and crossing — the picket lines seemed intimidated). Similarly, some undergraduates posted video they’d shot on their cell phones on the Quad. Seemingly enjoying themselves outside of class, one of the students laughs and she tells the camera that the “TAs” are being “loud” and “scary.” It was at times frustrating to see these students, of whose education we are such a crucial part, think of the strike as gratuitous. I hope, though, that seeing their teachers in the picket line and having to think about what that meant might have been useful higher education for some of the students.

By early afternoon, the news was spreading to suspend the strike and gather around the Foellinger Auditorium at the heart of campus to hear that GEO negotiated a side note guaranteeing the current tuition waivers for the duration of the contract and thus reached a tentative agreement. The celebratory crowd, with their banners, drums, and chants, had a few hours until GEO’s largest general membership meeting in its history came together to hear the details.

The strike was suspended, and over the three remaining days before the fall break, GEO members voted on ratifying the contract. It was strange how much we noticed being away from our respective buildings for just two days, but we were also happier than ever to be there. The dim halls of the English building sure seemed brighter Wednesday morning. I felt I had actually earned my right, in a more profound way, to work in that building. Walking across the street to the University YMCA to cast my vote felt like decompression after the intensity of the picket lines.

The after effects

Given how significant and controversial the strike was on campus, the attention to it among the general campus community seemed to wane rather quickly. Perhaps the tryptophan helped wash away the immediacy of the two-day strike over the Thanksgiving break. Only one of my students mentioned the outcome to me, as small talk when came to ask me about an assignment. But among the graduate students who picketed and had a hand in bringing about the best possible contract for us under current conditions, the effects of the strike lingered, and not just because our pay might have been docked to the tune of 50 bucks or so for the work missed during the strike.

We’re beginning to see the changes we have collectively worked for. As I write this, furloughs have resurfaced in the news over the past week or so, and it’s good to know we won’t face them even as we feel for those having to basically take a pay-cut under a slightly fancier verbiage. For some reason, the strike reminded me more than anything about the prospective graduate students I’ve shown around campus as they visited their potential new school.

We’d often talk about money, and where to live, and what grad school is really like, but we, the more experienced graduate students, talk about GEO. It might not register amid the whirlwind campus visits, but this one thing makes a world of difference. Our organized effort — the rallies and phone calls and meetings and activism of each of us, of those former grads who I barely remember from my first year — continues to make it possible for these new students to come here, and for them to show someone else around in their turn and tell them about the union that has helped them win a more fair contract.

Karoliina Engstrom

I saw it from the other side of the street, the corner of Chacabuco and Carlos Calvo, two blocks away from my apartment. I stopped. People continued to walk by — a man, a woman and child, a group of teenagers blasting Cumbia music. No one else noticed. I looked both ways and crossed the street to get a closer look, a confirmation that this was reality. The black spray-paint looked fresh, and I touched it, immediately checking around me to see if the painter was nearby, still stenciling. Two cop cars drove by. I took out my camera to photograph it. My first swastika.

My bewilderment slowly turned to curiosity and then quickly into fear. I had seen swastikas before, but only in dark movie theaters and on glossy textbook pages. I had always been a passive observer. I could be eating popcorn or highlighting dates. I thought the swastika was meant for Jews with German accents, waiting in long breadlines, not for me. Whatever vestige that remained of its original meaning had been reinvented for contemporary use. Who was its maker? How many of them were there in the city? Is my new home away from home not safe? What does it mean? Eventually I would read the image to be a comment on Israel’s current military actions, but at the time all I felt was the urgency and adrenaline of alarm.

With the rise in anti-Semitic attacks across Europe and the number of Latin American protests of the war in Gaza, I had begun to wonder about my safety and the general safety of other Jews in the world. Given Buenos Aires’ history of being both a sanctuary for Jews as well as Nazis, this one piece of graffiti should have the ability to shock and incite people into action or at least contemplation.

I took my thoughts with me to dinner, where I and a few other journalists convened after a brief milonga (tango dance). Rather than discuss the situation or the sentiments that were expressed, I was met with opposition. My colleagues were more concerned that I had never seen a swastika before than they were alarmed by what I had seen on my block, as if it should have been a part of my regular life, a rite of passage that every minority surely endures. They assured me that the graffiti I had witnessed was not part of a larger phenomenon, but the result of the actions of a hateful, ignorant few.

Yet in the coming days, news reports of similar swastikas being found all over the city — most shockingly nearby a children’s hospital — continued to pour in. I saw them on my way to work, on the walls across my sips of coffee, and the seeming indifference of the streets persisted. It wasn’t until the comments of an Argentine bishop were heard around the world that my peers understood my alarm. Something new was going on in Argentina.

I decided to sit down with Ana Weinstein, one of the directors of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA), a Jewish organization in Buenos Aires, to get a better understanding of the precedence and response to anti-Semitism in Argentina. She warned me to bring my passport, as security in the building was on high alert. On July 18, 1994, a car bomb exploded outside the original building, killing 85 people and injuring hundreds. This attack came after the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy, in which 22 people were killed. All this was common knowledge, as was the fact that authorities have been unable to locate those responsible for either bombing. Reports trickle in on occasion, telling of torture and violence for those who choose to investigate the tragedies. All Jewish affiliate buildings in the city maintain strict security.

When I arrived, a man in camouflage slacks spoke loudly on his cell phone. He screened my passport and led me inside, past a metal detector and two steel doors. I was excited to find all the contents of a Jewish Community Center in America — message boards with Jewish film screenings, lectures, and a cafeteria with knishes.

Up the elevator and to the left, I found Mrs. Weinstein, who greeted me with a hug and a kiss. A man brought us mate cocido, and we sat down to chat.

My prepared questions were met with complications. As an accomplished sociologist and leader of the Jewish community, Mrs. Weinstein deconstructed what my college professors had taught me to call “hate crimes,” “discrimination,” and “anti-Semitism.” It was all a bit trickier than that.

She described to me the history of the Jewish people in Argentina as well as the history of Nazi sympathies by the last dictatorship. In the middle of the century, Mrs. Weinstein explained, “There were ties between the military of Argentina and Nazi organizations. The regime was friendly to another fascist state.”

These political policies bled into the populace through their appeal: “Every family had a member in the armed forces, a lawyer or a politician, and a member of the church — let’s say a nun or a priest. Then there were these outsiders, Jewish people.” With such strong ties to organizations sympathetic to Nazi beliefs, sentiments were transmitted into the nuclear family. “For them the Nazi ideology was music to their ears. Nazis could enter Argentina easier than the survivors of the Shoa.”

With the return of democracy in 1983 and the rise of Alfonsin, the Jewish community welcomed the pluralism promised by a new democratic society. She described how 10 years later, after the 1994 bombings of AMIA, a different Argentina could be seen.

“Society felt hurt by the bombing and was ashamed. It is now better understood what it is to be Jewish; we are also Argentineans.” The economic crisis of 2001 provided similar solidarity between the Jewish community and the rest of nation. As thousands of people lost their jobs, savings, and direction, AMIA and other Jewish organizations opened up their resources to include all sects of people. Reaching out to everyone, they offered food, health, and job assistance. “AMIA recovered despite the severe attack to help others, and cared not only for Jews. We proved we are a positive presence within society, and anti-Semitism diminished.”

Anti-discrimination laws were passed, and the Delegation of Israeli and Argentine Relations was founded to monitor activities considered to be discriminatory. However, Mrs. Weinstein was careful to explain, “This does not mean anti-Semitism disappeared. More extreme parties who are anti-Israel, Yanqui, and Zionist have appeared. Groups like Quebracha and Partido Obrero attack Israel to support Palestine, or attack America to support Iran, but it is more complicated than that. There is a belief that Israel should have a right to exist and preserve itself. And separately, there are the actions of that state. The dialogue between Israel and the Diaspora is seen as unconditional support. They do not dare to see the distinction between Hamas and the Palestinian authority, and so an unconditional support of Israel is met with an unconditional support of Palestine.”

So who was the maker of the swastika? Partido Obrero? Quebracho? Or was it simply the psyche of the Argentine public scrawled on the walls? Should I be afraid?

Mrs. Weinstein mused over the question and responded, “It is a very strange moment. I’m worried; I’m not scared. There was a leader of one of the groups that announced, ‘You don’t have to look for the Jews in Gaza. You can find them here in their synagogues.’ It’s a change.”

I asked her what contact she had with these groups that might be responsible for perpetuating the swastika within the Jewish star, and her body language closed, and she grew very serious. “You cannot talk to those people. They do not understand what they do.” She warned me not to contact them, that they would tell by my accent I was Jewish, American, and everything they despised. I would be endangered should I make myself known to them. With my questions somewhat answered, I said good-bye and found my exit out of the fortress.

She did not dissuade my fears but only allowed me to grow more aware of certain paranoia always present in the back of my mind. Whether or not I agreed with the actions of Israel, I had been collapsing a pro-Palestinian argument with an anti-Semitic one. My head full of discomforting realizations, I walked past a congregation of young protestors waving newspapers. The front page bore an image of Palestinian victims from attacks in Gaza, with the words “La Solucion Final” (The Final Solution). It was members of the group Partido Obrero.

They looked like I did: mid-20s, jeans, funky sunglasses. I stopped and asked for a paper. “Would you like to get involved in the fight?” the girl asked me. I was about to make my father cringe and attempt to face generations of paranoia and fear. “Yes, I would like to know more.” I put my cell phone number down and wrote “Emilia,” my best attempt at masking my identity. I opened my purse, foolishly stuffed with Hebrew pamphlets I had picked up at AMIA, and paid the two pesos for the paper. She promised to call me for the next meeting. I exhaled. Marianela seemed pretty harmless.

The anonymous writer of the main article wrote, “The massacre in Gaza is a final solution to the Palestinian question… They act, without regard, from a barbaric and reactionary fantasy that no doubt will be like the final solution that Hitlerism intended against the Jewish community.”

The sentence “the final solution” caught my attention. Words like these and swastikas were once specific — to refer to Hitler and World War II. I always thought these ideas were instrumental in the creation of Israel, as they were the harbingers of Jewish suffering and the ideology behind the need for Israel to exist. When these words are used against Israel in this way, it destroys the reasoning behind Israel’s existence. If the Holocaust was the reason for Israel, and Israel causes a holocaust, then Israel loses its identity as a victim state. Those who were once oppressed have become the oppressors. This re-appropriation Holocaust terminology was not pro-Palestinian, but anti-Israel. Equating a Jewish star with a Nazi symbol achieves the same effect, only it’s not just anti-Israel — it’s anti-Semitic.

I met Marianela and her boyfriend Emiliano at a café in the center of the city. They brought along Marianela’s younger brother, who sipped on chocolate milk as we discussed the mission of Partido Obrero. The Trotskyist political party is the largest section of the Coordinating Committee for the Refoundation of the Fourth International, with its primary support amongst youths. Having formed in the middle of the 20th century, Partido Obrero was the host of the 2004 Movement for the Refoundation of the Fourth International, and the party has offices in Greece, China, and Venezuela.

I didn’t tell them I was a journalist and a Jew until we were an hour into our discussion of capitalism, class, and the seeming plethora of evils in the world perpetuated by the Jews, imperialists, and fascists. Emiliano used all these terms interchangeably until I stopped him and asked to record the remainder of the interview. I unmasked myself as a Jew and kindly asked him if he understood the difference between a Jew and an Israeli, to which he replied “of course.”

From then on, we talked in specifics about the mission statement of the organization. Emiliano is the leader of the Partido Obrero at the University of Buenos Aires’ School of Engineering, where he “organizes different activities around politics and sets up discussion meetings to come up with ways to solve the problems of the working class.”

With regard to Gaza, he eloquently described the situation and had a very clear argument: “I believe, firstly, that it is a mistake to call it a war. A war is a conflict between two governments or two states with opposing ideas or interests. There is no Palestinian government, so there can be no war. It is just a massacre. They are a community who oppose the Israeli rule. It’s a war crime. They are fighting for basic human rights: education, clean water, electricity, and we identify with their cause. We want to help them fight.” Marianela agreed, nodding her head.

He went on: “The Jews believe they have an excuse to maintain and perpetuate this wrong, but they do not… We aim to recognize that this isn’t a question of race; it’s not Jews or Israelis against Palestinians, but a state expanding with pro-imperialistic policies in line with the other imperialistic powers of the world. We’re talking about Sarkozi in France, Zapatero in Spain, Putin in Russia, Bush and his successor Obama — all of the leaders of nations employing new colonialism.”

I felt as if his answers were rehearsed, and unfortunately he had forgotten to make the distinction between Jews and the Israeli government. I felt like I was one of the first Jewish people he had ever met, and he too was shocked to see how similar I was to him in size and age.

And what would be the goal of this organization? What was it calling for?

“We want for all of the working class to unite against this injustice, to demand the troops be removed from Gaza. We want the proletariat of the world to go to the Israeli embassies and defend the Palestinian people during this massacre.” He was discussing peaceful protest; he did not advocate violence, but somewhere along the line I could see how this message could be misinterpreted. Mrs. Weinstein’s comments were echoing in my ears.

Finally I asked him about the front cover of the newspaper. I asked him about the swastika. Neither referred to the Holocaust, he told me. “The photo on the front of the paper is supposed to ask, ‘What is the truth of this action? What is Israel really doing to the people of Palestine? Why are they using this force?’ The only solution for capitalism is violence, to solve the financial crisis of the world. I did not know it had anything to do with Hitler.”

He then went on to explain to me the true identity of Hitler and how my alarm was misplaced.

“Hitler was born of a political and militant movement to fight the socialism of Russia. He became a fascist to organize the German people to fight insurgents and motivated the masses not only against Jewish people, but against Gypsies and homosexuals to maintain a regime of oppression. We don’t know who makes the stars, but they are misguided. We don’t have the same intention of whoever makes them. These drawings, this graffiti, I believe is wrong. We don’t believe that the state of Israel is a fascist state; it is not the same as Hitler.” I felt that to deny Hitler’s position and role as an ethnic cleanser and leader of genocide equally demeaned the message of the party.

The café’s tango music played on, and I stared blankly across the table. It was true that he didn’t understand the history of the Jewish state, but it was not malice that kept these two fighting for Palestine. In fact, Emiliano proudly commented, “Many Jews have written for Partido Obrero against the massacre in Gaza. I don’t know them, but they are members just like me.”

After following him in his circles, I posed one last question: “What is and where does anti-Semitism come from?”

Succinctly he responded, “The fact that the Jewish community has organized a state means that they have organized a society under a system of exploitation. A part of the society has taken power of the production to keep the rest of the population oppressed. The Jewish state has not been created based on the Jewish community needs but only on the needs of just part of the community. To support this system, they need to support anti-Semitism to keep the people afraid.”

After four hours of interviewing Emiliano, he invited me to a party on Friday that was being held by Partido Obrero. I told him I would think about it. I checked the address of the party; it was at its headquarters, a block away from my apartment. It was close, convenient, and maybe it would be a good idea to improve relations. I was ashamed at the courage it took to talk to them in the first place. My concern stemmed from an uncertain place and from fear, and perhaps because of the solitude of a year of expatriate life, I decided it would be a worthwhile endeavor to confront my fear head-on. I could go and represent Judaism; I could show them what I wasn’t. On my walk over I realized it probably wasn’t a good idea. A few meters away from Partido Obrero’s door, I passed the first swastika, black and bold, still unraveling my sense of self and the political party’s definitions of truth.

emily anne epstein

Undulating, moss-covered lava fields and grey skies surrounded me on the drive from Keflavik Airport to downtown Reykjavík, dubbed “101” or “the 101” by local hipsters. Speeding eastward along Route 41, I could see Faxaflói Bay spread out on my left and on my right; off in the far distance, sat the remnants of the former United States Air Force base. The surrounding landscape has been favorably compared to the surface of the moon, although I could not imagine the lunar surface looking so inviting. Navigating through the narrow streets of Reykjavík proved easier than I had anticipated, and after locating my small hotel on the western edge of the city, I checked in, refreshed myself, then left on foot for Laugavegur, Reykjavík’s commercial nerve center. It was barely eight in the morning.

Until its economy imploded in the early weeks of October 2008, Iceland had been for me, as it was for many of my contemporaries, best known as the home of a famous chess match, a U.S.-USSR summit that didn’t go so well in the 1980s, and a few quirky musicians. So it was a shock to discover that not only had the global financial tsunami lapped at the shores of remote, mysterious Iceland, but that the whole thing had nearly gone down in the span of a weekend. Who knew Iceland had such weapons of financial mass destruction? And who knew that it would end up turning these on itself?

Nearly a year after Iceland had almost fallen apart, I decided to visit Reykjavík to see for myself how Icelanders were faring. For the natives, rebuilding meant painful economic restructuring conducted under the glare of the international spotlight — and the attention was not always welcome nor, for that matter, kind. To me, Iceland’s collapse evoked pity and fear, as in it I saw reflected the fearful outcomes that might have struck my own fortunes had the U.S. economy not been so robustly buttressed.

A journey to Iceland, therefore, would be a touristic form of catharsis, an attempt to purge the unease of living in an economically unsafe world with a reassurance that if the Icelanders could keep themselves afloat, then there was hope for the rest of us. Call it a “recession vacation” or “vulture tourism”; either way, I wanted a front-row seat to one of the preeminent stories of the young millennium: a Western European democracy attempting to recover from total financial apocalypse and save itself from becoming the go-to punch line for the Great Global Financial Crisis of 2008.

The lay of the land

That first morning, I strolled through Austurvöllur, the public square facing the parliament building and the site of frequent protests, though on this morning the only signs of discontent were a row of placards planted along the edge of the sidewalk. No one else was around at the time, suggesting that whichever protest these signs had garnished had either taken a recess or was in preparation mode for later in the day. Though they were written in Icelandic, the boldface type, exclamation points, and earnest handwriting implied a manifest objection to the current state of affairs — though it seemed the height of Icelandic politeness that these signs, clearly left overnight, had stood at the edge of the square unmolested. Although it was only a few weeks past midsummer day, I felt the need to bundle up under fleece and winter coat, and thought perhaps I was being overcautious by allowing the “ice” in Iceland to convince me I had walked into a nation-size refrigerator.

In good time I navigated my way to Bankastraeti, and, as I had anticipated, the banks of Bankastraeti had been emptied — both literally and figuratively. The ghosts of decimated balanced sheets and lost savings accounts of nationals and foreigners were eerily called to mind by the residue of signage that had been haphazardly removed yet still lingered in faint sun-bleached traces on walls and windows. If trauma can be said to leave traces of heightened emotion in the places where such tragedies occurred, then Bankastraeti oozed the psychic residue of intense suffering and made me shudder. It felt unclean and unsafe.

After a short distance, Bankastraeti morphed into Laugavegur. The cityscape, such as it was, rose gently up a hill, but upon reaching the main drag, I found Laugavegur and its side streets littered with broken bottles, garbage, and puddles of multicolored liquid drying in the cool morning, as if a cyclone had ripped through the world’s largest liquor and vomit store and dumped the refuse across central Reykjavík. More ominous, however, were the shop windows. Although it was clear that the stores and boutiques were in business, filled with merchandise and accepting all major credit cards, almost every one of them had displayed somewhere on the glass the word útsala. Sale. Clothes, souvenirs, sunglasses, books, bicycles, even Dolce & Gabbana were discounted at 50 percent, 60 percent, 70 percent off. Deserted art galleries were another common feature, most of them depressingly emptied and abandoned, while others, barely operational, had unpurchased wares clearly visible through somber windows.

In the mercantile mise-en-scène of Lagevular, I could perceive a palimpsest of Iceland’s mercurial rise and fall. The functional if not entirely imaginative architecture of the row of shops betrayed a recent past life as a thriving yet quaint high street. Then, when the good times and good money rolled in, these storefronts were swiftly appropriated for high fashion, big-ticket luxury consumer goods, piled Gucci-high and Prada-deep. Yet with all these trappings, it was still easy to determine that these establishments had not been originally fashioned for fashion; the interiors were too plain, too dull. What I observed that morning was the third and saddest phase: the fire-sale panic of desperation, útsala signs superscripted over these august labels like diacritical marks of economic depression.

To get a better look at the city, I made my way up to the majestic Hallgrimskirkja, the Lutheran church that commanded an impressive view over all of Reykjavík. Its massive front, built to resemble pillars of columnar basalt, was unfortunately obscured by scaffolding, providing an unflattering backdrop for the majestic statue of Leif Erikson perched out front. Seen from the top of Hallgrimskirkja, Reykjavík in the Saturday morning sun lacked the gravitas one would naturally expect from a world capital. Suspended, as it were, both geologically and symbolically betwixt America and Europe, it lacked both the Old World weltanschauung of London or Paris and the New World, nouveau riche glitz of New York City. It was clear, however, that from its most recent financial gambit, Iceland was struggling to become a significant something — if not a mirror of its peers, then a distinctive North Atlantic equivalent — and this desire for that distinctive something-ness could be seen in the manic architectural eruptions on its fringes, mainly in the suburbs and along the waterfront in the form of glass and steel monoliths and Scandinavian-inspired high-rises.

Yet a collateral benefit of Iceland’s quest for something-ness has been Reykjavík’s transformation into a multicultural metropolis. With a population of nearly 120,000 (over 200,000 with suburbs included), greater Reykjavík accounts for nearly two-thirds of Iceland’s population of 320,000, 7.4 percent of which are foreign citizens. The majority of these are Central and Eastern Europeans. However, a substantial portion of this figure is made up of Africans and Asians. Up until the crisis hit, Iceland’s surging economy had necessitated the rapid importation of mass labor, mostly for the construction and service sectors. In 2000, the foreign population of Iceland numbered only 7,271, mostly in Reykjavík. By 2007, however, the boom was heating up, and 18,563 foreigners were living and working in Iceland. By the end of 2008, the year the banks crashed and the economy soured, the immigrant population stood at 23,421.

In absolute terms, 23,421 might not seem so significant. For Reykjavík, however, the sudden introduction of outsiders was not so much culture shock as culture electrocution. This sudden, rapid influx of foreigners propelled suburban expansion in Reykjavík (“do not shoplift” signs around the city are written in six languages, including Polish and Vietnamese). It also led to a serendipitous collateral industry: foreign restaurants. Indian, Chinese, Mexican, Italian, and even Nepalese restaurants dot the city and draw brisk business.

Saturday night runtur

Upon leaving Hallgrimskirkja, I heard a low rumbling accompanied by a loud hiss and the sound of breaking glass coming from below. I scrambled around a corner only to be nearly run over by a convoy of massive street-sweeping trucks. These large, cubical creatures slowly grazed on the filth lining the roads, scrubbing away the glass, trash, and puke with gigantic rotating brushes and sprays of pressurized water. In mere minutes, all traces of the mess were gone, and the beasts lumbered on to filthier pastures. Standing in the midst of what had only moments before been a trash heap, I was astounded that such chaos could be so smoothly transformed into order.

The disarray I had witnessed was not in fact the result of Iceland’s transformation into a dystopian trash heap, but rather the leftovers from the previous night’s runtur, the world’s most amicable kegger. On Friday and Saturday nights, a drinking ritual is reenacted, where Icelanders shed their northerly reticence, drive in circles, and — especially in the case of Reykjavíkians — drink themselves into a state of friendliness. Whether on the streets or in the bars, when Icelanders get excessively drunk, they don’t get mean; they get nice.

Eager to join in the festivities, I spent the rest of the day in low-energy pursuits, mainly museums and people-watching. Austurvöllur was crowded with locals and tourists, and the only indicator of disquiet was a lone protester standing in front of the parliament building. Surrounded by his poster and banging a gong, the white-haired man spent the afternoon howling invectives into a megaphone. Meanwhile, nearby throngs of Icelanders relaxed, sunbathed, and took advantage of the free Wi-Fi in the square, hardly noticing the man with the gong.

Later that night, I engaged Icelandic culture on its own alcohol-fueled terms. Returning to Laugavegur, I found the streets transformed into a spontaneous celebration and packed with revelers. Well-dressed adolescents with Hoxton fins and popped collars comingled with larger, older, more tastefully clad folk walking, driving, staggering, and occasionally singing their way across the city. I found myself greeted and smiled at by random strangers, tipsy teens apologized sincerely for accidentally bumping into me, and scores of 20-somethings honked and waved at me from their cars. The streets, especially Laugavegur, were choked with cars which were in turn choked with smiling occupants. Revelry, merriment, and politeness were in fluid abundance under the fuchsia glow of a sun that refused to dip too far below the horizon. If there were any harsh financial difficulties being suffered by those present, I could sense none of it amongst the runtur revelers that night, at least as long as the beer and brennavin (the local caraway-flavored schnapps) flowed, nor did it seem appropriate that night to spoil everyone’s pleasure by asking about unpleasant topics.

Instead, I literally went with the flow, in this case the flow of people, cars, and drink, which swept me down Laugavegur, up Hverfisgötu, and all through the backstreets and alleys, from bar to bar and club to club. I philosophized with strangers (in English, of course) and at one point observed two rowdy drunks being counseled to calm down by the police — and their complying without complaint. As I sat in the back of a gay bar at 4:00 a.m., umpteenth drink in hand, rockabilly band playing American hits, and women in scarves and poodle skirts dancing the night away, I was overwhelmed with an inexplicable sense of optimism.

As the hours passed and the midnight sun gave the sky a rose-tinted hue (although this could have easily been the effect of my bloodshot eyes), the litter accumulated, glass bottles were broken on sidewalks and in gutters, and puddles of puke blossomed anew on the pavement like wildflowers after an 80-proof rainstorm. This time, however, I wasn’t so worried as I was earlier that day. Perhaps it was too much of a leap to see in the runtur a metaphor of Iceland’s attitude about weathering its own grim economic forecast. That is, despite the hardships of the present, maybe all the driving in circles, drinking, and wild abandon would eventually get fixed somehow and by someone else, preferably whilst everyone was asleep. Then again, maybe this time the hangover of financial runtur might not be so easily sprayed clean by the even-handed application of state resources as Reykjavík’s streets were every weekend morning. Still, it was a comforting thought, as I made my way in the general direction of my hotel, that someone else was going to clean up this mess.

When financial hardship is not enough, add humiliation

The facts of Iceland’s economic collapse, like Sunday morning in Reykjavík, are startlingly bright, hard to ignore, and well known to everyone. The triumvirate — some would say the bankocracy — of Landsbanki, Glitnir, and Kauphthing banks had gambled big and lost bigger, the ratio of debt to the gross domestic product (GDP) being the neighborhood of around €50 billion to €8.5 billion. The nationalization of these institutions set off a chain of events resulting in austerity measures, political unrest, gallows humor, and the mass spontaneous combustions of Land Rovers by owners who preferred to destroy their vehicles and collect the insurance rather than be forced to pay them off. Unemployment, which had been 1 percent in 2007, had risen to 9.1 percent by February 2009 before settling to 7.2 percent the following October. The GDP sank 3.3 percent in the first three quarters of 2009.

And then there were the humiliations. As a price for breaching global financial decorum and actually falling apart, Iceland would suffer the shame of the public stockade. U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling famously invoked an antiterrorism law in order to protect the funds of British citizens who had deposited money in Iceland banks. At the news that the International Money Fund (IMF) had agreed to provide funds to stabilize the Icelandic economy, a mob of angry protesters assembled in front of the Althing, Iceland’s parliament building, demanding Prime Minister Geir Haarde’s resignation. President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson created a mild diplomatic stir when, in an attempt at self-effacing obsequiousness, he offered the Russians use of the abandoned U.S. airbase at Keflavik, apparently in exchange for a helper loan. (The offer was politely declined.) Michael Lewis, writing for Vanity Fair, added to the feast-of-fools atmosphere by describing in comic-horror vignettes the testosterone-juiced ineptitude underpinning the risky financial machinations of Iceland’s banks, while Icelanders were portrayed as chauvinist, sexist, and entirely inept xenophobes.

Iceland as financial terrorist. Iceland as fourth-world country. Iceland as Russia’s toady. Iceland as a financial idiot playing with nuclear weapons and getting radiation burns. To these one might add one more characterization that surfaced in the press just as Iceland was well under water: the ever-so-embarrassing detail that a majority of Icelanders reportedly “[did not] deny the existence of elves”and that consequently major construction projects had to wait for certification that no elves would be harmed. Iceland as elf-believers. It seemed that — in the case of Iceland’s recent historical catastrophe, anyway — the first time for Iceland was both tragedy and farce.

These were not appealing narratives, particularly for a country that had been, until recently, the poster child for the transformative power of bold financial risk-taking. A nation of speculator-spenders, buoyed by yen swaps and ebullient optimism, had seen its worldwide profile rise so precipitously that when the end came as spectacularly as it did, there was nowhere to hide from the shame of it all — the end came on too fast. The Reykjavík daily newspaper, Morgunblađiđ, reported that 50 percent of Icelanders aged 18 to 24 were considering leaving for good, no doubt to avoid the shame of living in a state with such clumsy bankers and politicians.

The “Library of Water”: the cure for tourist guilt

There was one other form of humiliation laid over the bad figures and the bad press afflicting Iceland: a spike in tourism, the ironic upside of having one’s currency devalued so viciously. Tourist shilling is a special form of humiliation, one that compresses economic necessity and local hospitality customs with the need to “perform” one’s self and one’s identity for the entertainment and edification of eager outsiders. Tourism certainly brings in the foreign capital, but at times the cost to one’s self-esteem can be as devastating as the financial meltdown itself, and in Iceland’s case, the 2009 tourism numbers sped upward almost as soon as news of the country’s collapse in October 2008, whereas Europe’s tourism industry declined across the board. It seemed that many like me had targeted Iceland for a recession vacation of their own.

Thus, over the next few days, I gingerly set forth to look for signs of economic recovery in ways I hoped would inflict the least embarrassment both for them and for me — call it tourist guilt. Unfortunately for my guilty conscience, my first stop turned out to be the most well-trodden of tourist haunts — the Golden Circle. Hovering over Reykjavík like a halo of geological wonders, the Golden Circle comprises an impressive array of natural and historical sites: the _ingvellir, the site of Iceland’s ancient parliament, founded in 930 A.D.; Gullfoss, a spectacular waterfall; and the Haukadalur Valley, home of Geysir, from which all geysers are named. The route took us past volcano craters both dormant and extinct, mirror-smooth lakes bursting with char, and a vast geological rupture that ran like a long, thin valley for miles. It was the Mid-Atlantic Ridge exposed to plain air, the meeting point of the American and European plates.

Over the next few days I spread out and covered more ground, the pangs of tourist guilt gently subsiding under the spell of Iceland’s brooding panoramas. I hitched a ride to Nesjavellir to see a geothermal plant, and later that day I caught a bus to Skógar and hiked up a segment of Sólheimajökull, an easily accessible arm of the Mýrdalsjökull glacier. Decked out with crampons and an ice ax, and avoiding crevasses and sinkholes, I made my way up several kilometers of aquamarine ice bespeckled with the ash and pebbles of a century-old eruption. Underneath the ice cap lurked Katla, a volcano that had last exploded in 1918 and whose threatened reawakening was a constant source of gossip and fearful speculation for the locals.

Along the way and at every stop, contrary to what I had heard about Icelanders’ legendary reticence, the locals I met and interacted with seemed willing enough to opine on the landscape, geology, local mythology, and crisis facing their country. The common refrains I heard were variations of familiar bromides about waiting things out and hoping for the best. Their responses brought to mind a house I saw near a mountainside on the trip back from the Golden Circle, a small, bright green summer cottage that happened to be completely surrounded by boulders the size of baby brontosauruses. Having been built so near a mountain ridge on an island prone to earthquakes, the builder was just asking for trouble; and yet when the big one hit, the house was miraculous spared. There was bold fatalism in that house, similar to the shrug that I saw Icelanders interject as they reflected on their economic travails.

On my last extended day trip, I met the chattiest Icelander, Magnús. I was set on visiting the seaside town of Stykkishólmer, resting on the southern edge of the Breiðafjörður fjord on Iceland’s west coast and apparently home to the best runtur in Iceland. My intention was to pay a visit to a particular art installation titled “Vatnasafn” (“Library of Water”) by the American artist Roni Horn, which consisted of water samples taken from various natural sources — mostly glaciers — from across Iceland and placed into tall, clear, pillar-like cylinders.

Magnús, my driver, spoke without ceasing, digressing with authority on biology, geology, architecture, and Icelandic history and mythology. He expounded on the sagas and showed me a path allegedly worn into the solid lava of Berserkjahraun by two feuding Vikings. At another point he stopped the car and asked me to listen to the landscape with him. Though it was an odd request, especially coming from someone who spoke so much, I indulged him, and for a few choice minutes together we stood at the side of the road, the sound of wind rushing down steep hillsides.

Back in the car he asked, “Would you like to try hákarl?”

For the uninitiated, hákarl is the preserved flesh of Greenland shark, famous for its nauseating smell and taste which reportedly once made Gordon Ramsay throw up. Catching Greenland shark the traditional way involves hooking it, wrestling it into your sailing vessel, then severing its spine below the skull while avoiding having your own spine snapped by its hideous jaws. Since the flesh is saturated with uric acid (the better to survive cold North Atlantic waters), Greenland shark meat is sliced into large sections, buried for several weeks, then hung to dry — or, if you prefer, rot — for many months afterward. The resulting product is a spongy meat the color of alabaster, usually cut in cubes, reeking of violent death. I was game.

After reaching Bjarnahöfn, an out-of-the-way farm at the end of a long, unpaved driveway, I found ways to delay the inevitable tasting that would surely cause me intestinal distress: I admired the horses, breathed the fresh air, and speculated on the unusual tools I saw hanging on the wall outside one of the buildings. A few meters away I saw a trailer with a blue tarp, its edges held down by ropes. I observed a child approach the tarp and lift one of its corners, revealing the sliced corpse of a recently caught shark. The proprietor of the farm was a longtime hákarl maker from a long line of hákarl makers, although on that day he was away, so Magnús introduced me to the hákarl maker’s grandson, who proudly showed off a collection of hooks and curio memorabilia arranged in a makeshift museum. Weird stuffed animals stood sentinel over ancient fishhooks and yellowed photographs of unsmiling fishermen. A well-preserved fishing boat was propped up on one side of the museum-shed, surrounded by desiccated shark faces and other seafaring accoutrements.

Set out on a table, unassuming yet foreboding, was a container of hákarl, with no alcohol chaser within easy reach. Even from a distance the smell was overpowering, and I hesitated before impulsively taking the plunge, spearing a piece with a toothpick and popping it in my mouth. My strategy was to chew and swallow quickly, then run for the door to projectile vomit — it would be over in seconds. Surprisingly, I was not overcome, neither by fumes nor flavor. As I chewed warily, the aroma, texture, and mouthfeel reminded me of the kinds of dried fish I used to eat in Hawaii where I grew up, minus the queasy formaldehyde-like after burn, though when offered I gently refused a second taste. That I had bested Gordon Ramsay just once was enough of a victory for me.

Shortly thereafter we headed on to Stykkishólmer, Magnús’s hometown. I was dropped off near the harbor with instructions on when I’d be retrieved. Breiðafjörður, the bay upon which Stykkishólmer sits, contains thousands of islands of varying size and a diverse array of birds and sea life, and I would have been remiss not to go out for at least a few hours and explore. I caught a tour boat that took me around some of Breiðafjörður’s major islands, remote and forbidding, crammed with puffins, guillemots, gulls, and even an eagle. The islands were unruly masses of columnar basalt rising vertically (and sometimes horizontally) out of the depths of the sea so steeply that the boat could sidle within arm’s reach of a cliff without threat of running aground. The stone looked like so much rebar gathered, twisted and misshapen with scant tufts of greenery tossed in to enhance the island effect. I could understand the impulse to design Hallgrimskirkja after these formations, as the islands themselves exuded a cathedral-like solemnity (minus Hallgrimskirkja’s fascistic undertones). The empty homes of especially brave farmers were planted on select islets scattered in the bay, and I noted the sheep grazing away, oblivious to us and their precarious isolation.

Back at Stykkishólmer, I hiked up the tallest hill to get a view of the harbor and environs and to visit the former town library, which had been altered to be the home of Roni Horn’s “Vatnasafn.” As I walked in, I was invited to put surgical booties over my shoes so as not to disturb the rubber flooring laid down as part of the installation. I found the columns of water scattered throughout the open rooms, and on the floor were words, mostly in English, expressing different moods: happy, sad, indifferent. As the light shifted during the course of the day, different moods would be emphasized by the refracted light of the water. From one of the large bay windows I could see a fancifully designed white church made out of stylish, modernist gestures (I later learned that Magnús had taken part in its construction, although he was not a churchgoing man himself). In another I saw a two chairs and a table with a half-played chess game. It was quiet, sunny, and warm inside the artwork, a welcome respite from the cool summer air outside, and yet I wondered, as I left, what had happened to the real library that “Vatnasafn”  had replaced.

On the drive back to Reykjavík, I drew up the courage to ask Magnús about his views of the economic distress. He knew things were bad, but living in Stykkishólmer, so far from the center of things, was both insulating and isolating, and he seemed content to let things work themselves out. As we drove through landscape dotted with volcano cones and craters, he mentioned the 1973 Eldfell eruption on the island of Heimaey. Faced with the loss of the harbor so crucial to the island’s economic survival, Iceland engineered a heroic rescue operation that involved pumping millions of gallons of seawater onto the advancing lava, cooling and diverting it. Despite the substantial destruction of property and a mass evacuation, the herculean effort succeeded in holding back the lava, and Heimaey was saved. And as if to add triumph upon triumph, the islanders managed to generate electricity and hot water from the residual volcanic heat and resurface the tiny local airport with the volcanic fallout.

Perhaps this is how Icelanders saw themselves and their relationship to the crisis looming before them. Hovering in the nether realms of the national sub-conscience, the Eldfell response showed how Icelanders could save property, prevent mass emigration, and turn destructive heat into productive energy through persistence, engineering, and a bit of luck. It was a tempting thesis, and I tried it out on Magnús. He shrugged the summer-cottage-in-the-boulder-field shrug.

The whales of July

On my final afternoon in Iceland I went whale-watching in Faxaflói Bay. As we chugged out of the harbor, I could see stark reminders of the building boom gone bust: half-built or empty buildings lining the shore. A sliver of an office tower, clad in floor-to-ceiling glass windows, stood imposing but hollow.

Although the puffins were unaccommodating that afternoon, the whales were abundant, and an especially frisky humpback emerged from the deep and whipped the tourists into a photo-taking frenzy. It spouted, flipped its tail several times, and approached so close to the boat that I could smell its fishy breath whenever it exhaled. Several minke whales later joined in.

On the return trip I befriended two women, an Icelander named Johanna and her co-worker, a Chinese exchange student. Both attended university and were taking the day off from their part-time hotel jobs. We spoke generally about the whales and the lack of puffins, then later compared digital pictures of the sea life.

I delicately brought up the subject of the economic crisis.

“It was crazy,” she began. “Too much money and not enough workers. Every high school student had a full-time job. Every day they would come home from classes and then start working.”

She said that even before the crisis it was the Icelandic way to graduate: incur debt buying homes and other luxuries, then spend a lifetime paying it all off. Generous government housing subsidies had set the stage for the madness that followed, and more easily available credit accelerated home-building and housing speculation ad absurdum. I asked her if she had felt the same compulsion to borrow and spend as her peers had, but she claimed she hadn’t.

“We’re probably going to join the EU,” she said with a sigh as we clung to the observation deck bars. “Things will probably get worse before they get better. But I’m not worried.”

“So you’re optimistic,” I suggested.

“Oh God, no,” she replied. “I’m moving to Vienna to live with my boyfriend. There aren’t any jobs here.”

Kekoa C Kaluhiokalani